Ok, so I've gotten involved with yet another odd project.

Some of you may know that for the past five years a friend and I have been not quite finishing a project to build a jetboat, based around a Honda Civic GTI engine and miscellaneous parts. Real life keeps intruding, and as a result it's still nearly done.

So anyway, I was browsing though the local online crap for sale website, and came across an ad for a Dowty Trubocraft jetboat (this is actuually how it was spelled! They meant Turbocraft, of course), on a trailer for £150 or near offer, just down the road. After wrestling with common sense for more than thirty seconds, I went along with James (my cohort in this venture), and had a look at it. When we left half an hour later, we were £100 poorer and towing a trailer

It's a mid-seventies to very early eighties boat in very good condition under the horrible paint, with a decent trailer and a crap engine, which I think may be the original one (a 2.3L ford Zephyr), which is full of water. For instance, when you remove the spark plugs, you don't really want to find they're rusty.

The long and the short of it is that we need to put a new engine in, which is an easy job since everything's so accessible, clean it up, and do a little rewiring. A weeks work, tops, but...

Which engine?

The original one was about 90BHP, which I feel is not really good enough. Since Ford have been good enough to produce modular powertrains for many years, pretty much any european RWD Ford engine will go in nicely. We want to get this running before the weather goes horrible, so we need to make a decision in the next week or so.

Our options seem to be, based on what's available in scrapyards and the like for little cost:

(A) Granada Scorpio 2.9i V6. 145BHP, bags of torque, cool sound, but thirsty and getting difficult to find in good condition (no one can afford to run them anymore)

(B) Sierra 2.0i DOHC 4-cylinder inline. 130BHP, somewhat less torque, but higher revving, identical block size and shape to the engine we took out, can be race-tuned to buggery, and someone I know at a local car parts place has one on his garage floor with all the trimmings, known working, with 46000 miles on it. In addition I have a supercharger from a Mercedes 230SLK which would fit...

(C) Rover 3.9i V8. 200+BHP, god knows how much torque, low-revving and bulky, but about the same weight as the V6. Rather thirsty, more expensive, but very reliable. Would need a little more work to make new engine mounts, but easy conversion.

(D) Something else. Would need to be from a rear-wheel drive system with the same direction of rotation as the Ford engines.

So, given these choices, what would you do in the same position? I tend to favour option B, although James likes A because it would sound nicer

pca