COMPANY SPOTLIGHTS

Company Spotlight Article ...




A behind the scene look at the man behind CC Racing Engines...

 

 

While attending the 2008 Winter Nationals in Orlando Florida, I had the pleasure of pitting with Carlo Catalanotto of CC Racing Engines. I must say we had a great time, but it wasn't all fun and games! One of the racers pitting with us had an incident with one of his boats and after overheating due to a blown off water line, the motor in his boat was rendered inoperable...but not for long!

After a quick tear-down, Carlo noted that the cylinder was destroyed. The motor had gotten so hot that a crack formed in the top of the cylinder and was all the way through the side. The piston survived with only a minor case of the ring gripping in the groove. The crank and connecting rod looked ok and showed no discolouration. The decision was taken to prepare a new cylinder and get the motor ready for the next heat.

Carlo took the cylinder in his trailer to start working on it and invited me to watch. What I got to witness was nothing short of amazing! I'd heard of some guys getting out the Dremel and modifying motors on the fly, but I had never seen it before, and honestly, I doubt many of them would have turn out this good, especially considering the tools he had to work with. I kid not, Carlo did the entire porting with only one cutter, since that is all that was available at the time being and it wasn't even the right one! It was a coarse cutter that really removes a lot of material in a hurry, so a VERY steady hand is a must to get any kind of decent port work done.

Anyway, after about 30 minutes in the trailer and a whole lot of aluminum shavings later, the cylinder was ready. I wish I had taken pictures of the inside of this cylinder to show here, but I can honestly tell you that it was almost an insult to a guy like myself who likes to do a lot of motor work himself! In less than 1/4 of the time that I would take to prepare a cylinder Carlo had done a much cleaner job AND with a cutter that most people wouldn't even consider using for this kind of work. I was amazed!

The motor was re-assembled in no time and the boat went on to finish all heats and ran like a pro. The motor was dubbed "trailer trash" as a joke!

One thing that was very interesting in all this was to get to see the motor's (which was not originally a CC motor by the way) internals before and after Carlo worked on it. The port work on the "before" and "after" cylinders was very different. Although the work done to the original cylinder looked pretty clean, this wasn't the case for some other parts of the motor that had been worked on.

I have almost always done my own motors but I now have a few CC Racing engines of my own and I am always surprised at how clean and precise the work is...but after seeing what the guy can do with a simple Dremel and single bit in 30 minutes, I understand now why something coming out of his shop comes out looking so good! :)

Thanks for the crash course in porting Carlo!

 

Happy Boating!