Aeration for Kaama drives
 

Those of you running Kaama setups...

Anyone toyed with the idea of adding aeration tubes to your Kaama drives? Teague has a neat video showing benefits for surface drives. I would assume this would fix some of the issues I have read regarding the way a kaama boat planes?

Thoughts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0qPLuN5HY4

Hmmm? Interesting. I've seen them on SSMs before, but never a Kaama or Arneson. I thought they ventilated too much already! haha! I never have trouble shifting or around the docks (probably the TwinDisc) Might be worth a shot, although once you find that "sweet spot" setup and rpm where a Kaama likes to launch, they're aren't all that different than an SSM. There's maybe a couple of seconds of free-wheeling at about 4k rpm, one blade grabs, then the next, and away you go!

I have an aeration tube on my arneson boat but it adds air forward of the props via the Bernoulli effect. It is a twin engine boat with the props at 16 3/4" on center.
The air is introduced between the 2 props at the the notch. Not sure how it effects planning but I thought it was to allow higher pitched props to spin faster with less torque.

Did you get the boat like that or did you just add them and do you have any pic's of the set up ?

I did think about it BUT all I really needed was the extra blade. 5 blades make them get on plane VERY well. I still had some blowout. 1400 to about 3000 then they would grab and off you go!

I did have alittle problem with shifting have the motors wanting to stall. If you trim the drives up alittle it will take care of that keep in mind the boat does not react as fast!

Yes, it was already installed when I bought the hull. I can email you a pic as I can't figure out how to add it to this post. But all it is is a thru hull in the pad where the transom is notched,connected to a piece of an AN-20 tubing strapped to the transom.

Arneson was literally the first to do this.. Only recently have people been putting them on the Mercury drives

Hey Rik, what was Arneson's experience with them? Is it something to try?

They work great. We've been doing this since the 70's so it's nothing new.

We use them a lot with the diesel boats to get the boats up on plane faster. Also on the gas power'd Turbo charged engines we started doing this with originally.

Basically they help the bottom end to get the boats up on plane faster. Once on plane they do nothing as obviously they are out of the water.

Rik,
Hope all is well. Now I am curious, how are they usally installed on ASD's?