Bravo water pickup
 

I recently raised my x dim, my propshaft centerline went from 8" below to 5". Some people have told me I will need to block off the top 2 holes and modify the bottom holes. Others have told me to try it and see what happens. Anyone have any experience with this?

Just put a water pickup on your transom and block off the pickup on your drive...

I don't think at 5" you will have any real problems. That is still not an aggressive height.

The consensus from everyone on all the different sites is to try it first before doing any mods. I have all 16an lines for water, I will have to see what type of fittings are available. I have a hand held fuel pressure gage, I think it may work for water, I will do a little more research.

My stock bravo 1X had a depth of 6" before current mods....no issues

Yeah, try it first and see how it goes and then take it from there.

Run it.

Now keep this in mind, I have the standard side pickups, this is NOT a low water pickup drive. Just looks as though at higher speed the water would miss the top holes.

There is no way to find out if you have an issue or not, other than running it first to find out.

If you don't want to do that, then you can put a transom mount pickup on it to feed the engine. BUT you still want a way of circulating the water through the drive, so that would mean putting a fitting on the inside of the transom assembly, then a through hull fitting to dump the water back out. I've seen where some people use this as a make shift drive shower. The general consensus I've read on this is that you definitely still want the water running through the drive, regardless if you are using it for engine cooling as well or not.

I'm doing the same thing that you just did, moving my X up to 18 inches. I plan to run it first prior to going to a transom pickup or plugging the top two holes, fwiw.

This is the same info I have been getting from others. Just tyring to be pro-active if somone else has already tried the same thing on a similar boat. Always good to get as many opinions as posible then make a decision.