Thanks for the pics!

the upper gear setup looks very simalar to the TRS with the exception of straight cut gears. The lower gear set also looks to have straight cut gears and the addition of some kind of oil circulator/pump.

The lower gears on the TRS were pretty small so I would assume those are better!

If it makes you feel any better I blew up one of my BMax uppers last year... It was 3 yrs old with approx 150 hrs on 800+ hp in a 10K+ lb. boat. It cost me $6K for a remaned upper.

I'm still happy with their product although customer service could be a little more responsive.

After looking at the headers in this section, I gotta agree with Elite. 90% of the traffic in this area is about broken Bravos or not being able to find parts for older Speedmasters and TRS's.

I know two older Cigarette owners who converted from TRS to Konrad, and both are absolutely, 100% ecstatic. They sound like advertisments for the company. Plus, you have to figure that the Navy is a pretty tough customer.

Joetool had a tough break. I've been there with other manufacturers, too. Sometimes it's impossible to tell why something happened once everything's torn up.

fastoys, Konrad is not aftermarket they are used as OEM on many new boats in the private sector and the military. They are widely accepted in the commercial marine industry where they have duty cycles of greater hours than most of us operate in a year. Aftermarket is considered the addition of non-factory parts, accessories and upgrades from a secondary market supplier. An example of aftermarket would be the addition of a drive shower or maybe a gear set like what IMCO makes. Since Konrad manufacturer and supplies their drives as a complete system they are a primary OEM manufacture.

Joetool, from what I understand you modified your gearcases didn't you? Can we see some pics of your drives and the failure? If the drives where modified then you've turned into your own R&D and failures come with the territory. Since the failure is so rare it would be interesting to see what caused it so the rest of us Konrad owners can avoid it.

All I did to my drives was reshape the nose cones. I had way too much prop slip at high rpm and yes the modification worked it dropped my slip factor. Konrad told me that it would not hurt my drives shaving off a half inch.

I too am interested in more details of this modification...

My original lower case noses were rounded, and at that time their nosecone was a bonded/welded afterthought. Very labor intensive to produce. They had some prototype casings in house with an integrated nosecone that were going through hydrodynamic testing in their 80,000 gallon dyno cell/pool. This testing has been underway for *months*, yet they weren't ready to cough them up for me to play with. Another iteration of the castings had arrived, but hadn't been machined to accept gears yet. Once they were ready, I got a set for my boat, and another set went into the dyno cell, and we co-R&D'd these things, comparing slip and speed numbers with the original lower housings. In my application, heavy non-stepped Fountain hull (sounding familiar?) speed increases were marginal (.5mph), but slip numbers improved significantly (-2 to 3%). But my biggest gain was the stability in hard cornering. The longer "rudder effect" made the back end feel much more planted in the turns.

Where am I going with all of this??

I have worked with these folks a LOT. I have Ken's, Randy's, Fred's, Chad's, Mark's, Mike's, and Kurt's cellphone numbers stored in mine. We have bounced a LOT of ideas off of each other and I cannot tell you how many times I launched my boat, got to the end of my canal, laid the sticks on the dash for 5-8 minutes, turned around and did it coming back, put the boat back on the trailer and called in for a report. Swapped props, and went out and did it again.

JoeTool, I'm not ready to put words into anyone's mouth, but I can take a Real Good guess on how your conversation with someone at Konrad went: ...You want to do *what* with the gear case? There are a lot of factors that affect slip, and the nosecone has shown to improve it. They're your drives and you're welcome to make whatever mods you'd like. Sawing off a half inch of the nosecone will not compromise the casing...

That's a far cry from "sure, that won't hurt anything".

I'm with Lofty, I'd like to see what these look like now. Also like to see what the failure looked like. Do you know that the laminar hydrodynamic flow getting to your props is clean? No resonance? Total contact with the housing on the way there? No minute vibrations happening causing chatter in the lower's teeth? Have you "listened" to your drive's teeth?

R&D is done at a price. That price pays dividends when all of us (well, ok 99.9% of us) can go out and beat these things to death and enjoy trouble-free boating.

That's my $.02, anyway.

Brian

I'm with Brian here (p4-33), I can only imagine what that conversation sounded like. But ok.

Drives are pretty expensive so I like to leave them the way the factory built them and with factory parts inside. Even playing around with different lubricants is a huge risk. I take the same approach with engines and builders. I figure "you built them then they're yours". When something fails and they're stock then it's easier to identify the failure with the manufacturer.

Since I know about as much about hydrodynamics as a bathroom lawyer on contract law, I wouldn't think of modifying the the gearcase or nosecone. I would just as soon put my own steps on the bottom.

How come no one mentions Imco drives.. nobody uses them?

I haven't heard much about the SCX drive (my guess is there isn't many out there?) BUT I had a few bad expereinces with the IMCO Extreme SC's, I blew two in 20 hours and after about $10K in repairs/replacements I decided to throw in the towel and buy the BMax drives.

My investment in the Bmax drives has been a good one so far, even with one failure in 150 hrs with 800+ hp in a 10k lbs. + boat running in the ocean..

Yeah, Same here. I went Bmax uppers with IMCO -2 lowers.
Once I got the cyro gears in the lower the only thing that lets go from time to time is the Bmax vertical shafts. I run hard in some big waters but throttle well for the most part. I'm 95% happy with the setup.