Offshoreonly.com - konrad inner transom plate

Thanks Open72. There are vast differences in steering setups on boats... inside rams, outside rams, Latham, Marine Machine, IMCO, etc, etc. Konrad custom-makes the back plate for the drive to work with whatever setup you have. This all comes out of the "discovery" process on the front end of the sale, working with their application engineers. Once they understand what is required, their machinists can do just about anything.

MrCig, the first of the tuning exercises was to play with spacers. A TRS is 1.68" longer than a Konrad, so they have 1.68" spacers, as well as 1" and 1/2". We started with 1" and got the same speed as my TRS setup - a bit over 79mph. Keep in mind that the Konrad uses 1 1/4" XR style propshafts, so we were working with a different set of props, too... multiple variables. The first set of XR style props we tried was a 26" P-5x Hydromotive. I usually ran a 28" Quad IV. Even tho my top speed was the same, the props felt sluggish from 60-75mph.

Moving up to a 1/2" spacer gave me right at 80, but still sluggish acceleration. We attributed this to the 5-blade setup at the wrong pitch, so I shipped my 28's off to Throttle-Up for a hub change and and tune-up.

Wow! What a difference the 28's made. 60-75mph acceleration went from 13 secs to 7! Top speed was 81.5mph. So I removed the 1/2" spacer, and gained another 1/2mph, to a solid 82.

A couple months later, Konrad introduced their in-cast nosecone lower. With these, I gained another 1 1/2mph and now run 83.5 with the 28" Hydro's at 5200rpm. Doing the math, I think this works out to about 8% slip. I use this as my "fast" setup for general cruising and poker runs.

Seeing that APBA limits P4 speeds to 80mph, I run 25" Hydro P-5x's for my race setup, which puts me at 79.6 or so, @5500 rpm. The 25" blades also give me a great bite thru and out of the corners.

I understand that Cigarettes, being a heavier boat, with TRS setups are often under-propped to help drives live longer. The beauty of a TRS/Konrad conversion on a Cig is that you're able to prop the boat more accurately because drive failure is taken out of the equation. Higher drive heights, along with a sleeker lower case, and the correct prop has netted a couple Cig/Konrad owners 5 mph on the top end.

Hope this helps.
Brian