A friend of mine had the same boat I do(Unlimited 191) for 7 years with a VP duoprop drive. I bet his boat had over 500 hours on it when he sold it and he wasn't nice to it at all. He liked to drive it hard and he liked to air it out between the Lake Michigan rollers. He never had one single problem with that drive.

Jayhawk, use a Huber Marine transmission. I bought used transmissions and sent them to Tom Huber. Very reasonable $, good delivery, two seasons behind 735 HP with no problems. With a Bravo or VP drive you do not need a transmission. With Konrad or MC SSM drives you do need a transmission. Joe Murray

Sportier than this? (Check out the "sleek" Bravos in the background.)

Or these? (Never mind the diesel engines for now...)

Jayhawk261

I could not find anything about a Vortec 525HP 496 at the Marine Power site you had a link for. From what I know, Vortec-Gm Powertrain advertised in 2004 but could not deliver or produce the 525HP 496. The only ones I know about are the HP3's that Innovation built for APBA race teams. I think they were for lease only and didn't think they could be bought for 14K. I think the only real 525HP 496's available now are 496's with our Raylar HO525 kits. Just some questions?Volvo does use the same 496 as Merc. and we have several running our HO525 kits, with good results as long as the exhaust systems are upgraded.

Ray @ Raylar
www.raylarengine.com

Anybody know how much a DPX setup would cost? What about a regular DP? Might be repowering a Donzi 22 Classic and that looks like it might be a good choice....

Woodsy

http://www.marinepowerservice.com/En...%2B%20%20525HP

Viper 31 beat me to it! Take a look at that link. Unless something is amiss or their website isn't up to date, it looks like they have them for sale. I haven't called them to verify or anything.

Anybody know what the average price for a Mercury Racing 525EFI is?

Who cares how they look. In the top picture the entire lower is under water, how fast is that boat going to go?? For a cruiser it would be ok but I doubt you're going to get the setup going over 70 mph.

Also, that drive (top pic) is designed to break away, had a few good articles about it in Power & Motoryacht including a report when it did come in contact with the bottom. Not pretty.

My concern is prop selection with non-merc drives or are props available with 4 or 5 blades for Volvos?

Foutain built some boats(38F/47L that I saw) with Volvo DPX's and similar power to C-SPRAY's, and I can assure you that they went cosiderably faster that 70 mph.