I have a 1988, 8.8 meter spitfire that had TRS drives and Velvet Drive transmissions that is being converted over to Bravo drives. My question is Freeboard, The boat sat in the water with the bildge drain hole about 6 inches above the water line in the back. By removing transmissions, TRS drives, and shifting the engines back in the bilge about 12" to 14" how far above the waterline will the bilge drain be? removing at least 350 lbs out of the back of the boat should raise it, but then shifting 1600 lbs back 12 to 14 inches would tend to lower it??

Unless someone has done the exact same thing to the exact same hull it's going to be a wild azz guess. My WAG would be that the waterline will move very little.

There are a few 8.8 built with Bravos but the X dimension is very different than TRS and the boats never behaved all that well with B1s. why not go to Konrads, they bolt right on and work great! Ours has over 500 hrs on the drives with 600hp sitting in front of them, still no problems. PM me your email and I'll send you pics, I've done a dozen or more conversions to Konrads, it's a really great drive.

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While the ACE Konrad would have been my first choice, I had to opt for the less expensive option of BRAVO's, because I hardly ever run past 3500 rpm, coupled with the most important fact that made my decision. I am getting older, I just couldn't keep the engines where they were, Have to take the closed cooling system off along with the circ. water pump (required for Closed Cooling), just to be able to service the raw water pumps. I can't hang upside down in the bilge anymore. The engines moved back about 14" total, so now I can fit in and do things like water pumps, spark plugs, bilge pumps, without tearing down half of both engines, just to get in a position to do this work.


Float test done with bravo's installed, has the boat floating at almost the exact waterline as before the swap, perhaps 1" higher. YEAH! Now they have to find the right props, most likely going to be 5 blade, Hydromotive QIV did not work (prop that was on boat to begin with).

Glad to hear it went well. Where in cape do you keep it? I live in cape near del prado and viscaya.