anthonystempak

Anybody put those kamas surface drives on a either hulls with what success, they were said to be good?

excalibur82

They made afew of them like that....

CDShack

I have a 84' Scarab II Innovation Marine (30') with Kaamas. The boat is great! Takes alittle getting used to, but good speed for power used. I have two 500hp (dynoed) carbed 468s and it will always run 78mph (gps) and in really good water I've seen 82mph. Learning to get it on plane and it's quirks are what kept it from becoming wildly popular in the 80's I think. Have a buddy with a matching boat, has 650hp 540's and he runs mid 90's. Deadly simple engineering. All bearings and seals are stock stuff available anywhere . Casale v-drive gears, spicer u-joints and yokes. Shafts can be made at any decent machine shop. Cases are the only trick, but they are still available, just not readily. I've bought enough parts over the years that I have two complete spare drives! I rebuild them myself every couple of years just to be safe.

Way ahead of their time! Wish someone would buy the rights and bring them back!

scippy

iTrader: (3)

CD shack,
I agree about the "Deadly simple engineering" the least mechanical friction loss with best tranfer of power..........better than any high priced I/o out there!
Would love to put a pair of surface drives on my 27' Mag sport.

CDShack

When I first bought the boat in 1989, I took it to the lake and was upset!!! I could NOT get that dude to plane for anything. I tried drives up, down. Tabs up, down. Nothing worked. I limped around for about 20 minutes trying to figure it out before I called the previous owner. He said throttle up to about 4k rpm and hold there (even if it kills you) and wait! I hung up the phone, dropped that dude in gear and set it at 4k rpm and thought this is nuts! It moved forward to about 10mph cavitating like crazy. About 5 seconds, one drive grabbed, in the next second or two the other grabbed and away we went. After that it was never an issue to me, however, that "rev" start (and massive rooster tail) did draw a lot of attention in the day when most big boats were TRS drives and just lumbered up on plane. LOL!

I think they are great! If you can run across a set out there with trannies and all trim cylinders and tie bars, I think you'd love them!