This all sounds well and good, until you want an engine built by someone other Mercury Marine or Volvo. Many 500+ hp small volume engine builders will be locked out of the boat market by emission regulations that frankly will not have any measurable effect on air quality. Go to you local marina. How many boats do you see being launched with engines over 500 hp? Usually none. The small volume performance engine builders do not have the equipment or manpower to develop multi-million dollar emission programs to be certify only a few engines a year. It's ridiculous. The bottom line it reduces your choice, increases your cost, puts people out of work at a time when the boat industry is in the dumps, and has no measurable effect on air quality.

Here's the real kicker. Mercury Marine lobbied CARB to drop the 500 hp exemption. They also lobbied to allow them to average in Racing Division engines (without cats) with their high volume production engines (with cats), essentially putting the small engine builders out of business, who have no high volume engines to average against. Sound fair?

We absolutely need to band together and lobby CARB and the EPA to reinstate the 500 hp exemption. Get ready to write some letters people. Details to follow soon.

Michael

I read the regs last night and I note that the rules propose 2010, small manfs have til 2011 and >500bhp have until 2013. Plus the actual emissions standards for very large engine still seem to be in the form of discussion type documents with questions being asked of the manufacturers rather than the prescriptive "you will do this" sort of thing.

@Dmoore, If you read the regs and discussion documents, the authorities are already working with the manufacturers on what is possible including testing catalysts in actual boats. The sensors would be upstream of the cats anyway, so the cat would keep them dry. Keeping water reversion low is certainly a challenge but cats significantly reduce the amount of pulsation downstream anyway so that would be less of an issue than with an open exhaust.

It's not simple, nothing in engineering ever is but it is interesting. There is a large section of the preamble which goes through estimated annual US boating emissions and it's tens of thousands of tons of pollutants. Given that a cat would reduce these by 90% (Marinisers own figures in the discussion documents), I don't think it's very helpful to say that emissions would be unaffected. As engines are replaced and newer boats replace old, the whole "national dock" would become cleaner and emissions would be reduced. SInce you'd also save fuel with a more modern EMS, is that a bad thing?

The inevitable is coming and yes, it will put a dampener on small engine builders. Of course this will be hard to enforce at first, but as usual, the "enforcers" will find a way too. Smaller engines with superchargers and low overlap cams will come forth. Closed loop efi will become the norm.

I agree this will have a drastic affect on the marine industry for a while but it will be worked through as everything else. It's ridiculous that this is happening to such a small market of "polluters". Low temp catalyst technology has been around for quite a while, a coating for radiators that would help with air pollution is one we never hear about. I don't know all the details but I heard if this simple coating was on 50% of the cars' radiators in L.A., the smog table would drop a foot a day until almost immeasurable. Rather than pay the patent owner, let's smog some boats and lawnmowers. :hitfan:

The ting I see Ruadiadh falling to say is. Does anyone here think Merc. Volvo & whoever else is going to eat the R&D cost. I don't think so. I talked with Jack Roush about us building marine motors & he felt by the time we did enough R&D to keep up with Merc. our motors would be atleast as expensive if not more. FYI any R&D projects & there cost get baked into the final cost of the motor. Every damn thing I have now has some converter on it I gave at the office leave my open header,superchargered boat out of it.

Catalytic Coverters...

Nothing a crowbar and a vacuum cleaner can't fix....

Oddly enough that approach works on foreign & domestic. I did that to all of my mid 80's vettes & my 90 Testarossa. My 550 I bought the euro by-pass Tubi's.

Ruaraidh makes a good point:

And don't think they won't be enforcing it at some point.

Some outfit will sell or flash a reprogramed ECU "for racing use only" in about five minutes.

Don't sell short American ingenuity.

:D ;)

Well Ruaraidh, that all sounds really nice. I'm sure it works great in a lab, and I'm sure it'll all be ironed out, oh, sometime in the next decade or two, years after it's been mandated and millions of $ have been spent by boaters, boats have sunk or been torched, and lives are potentially lost.

In reality though, what it really boils down to is added expense, reduced reliability, increased maintenance, increased weight, and another added point of failure.

All that to appease some whimsical, enviro-nutjobs and the damned EPA. The total benefit will be negligible at best, and a total fvcking disaster at worst.

And in light of the fact that marine engine emissions only comprise approximately 2% of the total national emissions, it's a complete waste of everyone's time, energy and money.

:mad: