Registered User
Country: UK
Location: Poole Dorset, UK
Occupation: Company Director
Interests: Boats & Boats
Boat name: Kalaazar & " Side Winder "
Boat make: Fairline Targa 48, Magnum 27 Sport (1971)
Engines: Volvo 73P`s 430hp. Dart/Bontoft 383 ci`s
Cruising area: Poole Bay Etc
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Poole Dorset, UK
Posts: 139
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Magnum Tornado update.
Magnum Tornado was recoverd for the bottom of Lyme Bay on the 26th of November 1968 and was rebuilt as a Class 1 offshore powerboat, as was.
She was relaunched on the 24th of June1969. with the same engines. After several high speed trials she was made ready for the 1969 Cowes-Torquay-Cowes race. Two days before the race my father asked me to take my mother for a short low speed ride up through Poole Harbour. It was indeed both very short and very slow, just as I put the boat on to the plane and opened the throttles one engine just stopped. We returned to Salterns Boatyard to discover that we had lost a rod through the side of the block and broken the camshaft into four pieces. By this time I had spent both a lot of time and even more money returning the boat to race condition and could not afford a replacement engine. After coming to terms with the situation I decided that Class II would be perhaps more my price bracket and Magnum Tornado was stripped down with all of the mechanical parts being sold off. The good engine went into a 27 ft offshore cat and all of the parts of the other engine went as spares. The V-boxes were sold off and one actually went to `Nat the Thatcher` from Devon who won the cruiser class in a Tremlett with parts from Magnum Tornado. After a couple of years we completed the transformation of Magnum Tornado in to a cruiser which was fitted with two 250 cu ins straight six Mercruisers on stern drives. These engines were tuned with Clifford Research parts from California whose slogen was '6 = 8', which it might do in a car, but not in a boat the weight of Magnum. With super hot cams, four barrel carbs and up rated valve springs on Cosworth tuned heads we continually either broke the valve springs or pulled the valves through the seats. The weight of the boat was simply too much for the engines. So those engines were removed and sold to Roger Kelly who fitted them into a 23 ft Levi named O'Lor and I fitted two Mercruiser 255 on TRS drives. The boat ran well but as they say in America, there's no substitute for cubes, and having previously driven the boat with almost 1000 hp, 510 hp is hardly a turn on. After some two or three years of running the boat in this configuration, I advertised it for sale in Motor Boat & Yachting, and received a call from a man named Henry Linderloft in Sweden who was an endurance ski racer/record breaker and that is where Magnum Tornado went to. I did not modify the Magnum hull except to angle the transom to take stern drives. The boat which Jon referred to was in fact a whole nother story.
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