Just because something looks fun on the internet doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for you to try it. For example, you might like the idea of recreating a world-record base jump you saw on YouTube, but you’re in for a bad time if you recruit a couple of drinking buddies to make it happen. In much the same way, it’s a bad idea to install a big turbo on your boat engine without any sort of enclosure to keep your noggin protected in case of an incident. Ask this guy and he’ll tell you.
YouTuber Parker Mitchell found out the hard way while piloting his longtail riverboat off the coast of Florida. He bought it from Thailand, where these turbocharged diesel vessels are super popular. There’s a chance you’ve seen viral videos of Thai speed freaks zipping down narrow waterways with one of these, belching black smoke as they crank the throttle. That’s essentially what Mitchell was doing when the boat engine’s whirler went kaboom.
From what I gleaned by watching some of his older videos, Mitchell was running a pretty big Holset turbo on a 3.0-liter Isuzu 4JJ1. Actually, he appeared to be running two of them, but only one of them blew. It’s almost impossible to know exactly what speed the turbo was spinning at, but given the high engine revs, it was likely over 100,000 rpm and maybe closer to 200,000 rpm when the housing failed.
Now, a lot of times you’ll see turbos wrapped with a blanket. That’s usually on the turbine side, though, and it was the compressor side on Mitchell’s Holset that exploded. Even though a typical thermal blanket might not have stopped the shrapnel from hitting the boat’s passengers, some other type of enclosure definitely could have.
Instead, a small brace on the wooden boat is all that kept this chunk of turbo from absolutely nailing a guy in the back. He still caught some metal with his mouth, but everyone involved walked away from the ordeal in much better shape than they could have.
You can see in close-up shots of the engine that the explosion punctured the charge pipe, not to mention the scars on the boat itself. Oil spilled onto the floor as a result of the failure, too.
They were all laughing and joking about the explosion before someone came to their aid, and before long, they were pulling the boat out of the water with a new F-150 Raptor R. The boat will probably live again—this isn’t the first time it’s had engine damage—and the guys will live to make another video. I just hope they know how close it was to that not being the case.
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