Yes, this months hot boat magazine has a very interesting article about a conversion by imco.

question is seatek 750s with arneson or what other work best with what tranny and prop to obtain what speed in a skater 40

Where can I find info on the duramax diesels and the marinization process? Are they ready for prime time? What transmissions are being mated to the duramax's?

Thanks,

T

I know there are 3 shops working on this project in all U.S,in florida,ca and another in midwest,its not ready yet til at list one more year and will work with sterndrives.If you're interested in findind out more inovation marine in sarasota is one of the shops.

Matador,

I'll give my 2 cents and I've been accused on here of being "not relevant" but I think the Arneson is as good of a drive as you can get. We built test boats (patrol) with Arneson and Trimax drives, the Trimax's are hard to steer, when you get in the marina you needed to steer the boat with the engines as the steering was non-functioning.

The biggest advantage they (Trimax) had was the built in tube to vent the props that worked much better than anything we could rig onto an Arneson.

As far as gear ratios, I'm going to catch flak here, but our boats were designed to run in the open ocean, top speed not as important as being able to throttle the boat and not loose momentum. We used contrary to common practice very high overdrives and very little props.

The Gancia dei Gancia ran a 1:1.5 overdrive and a 14 1/2" dia prop.

I personally do not attest to the diesels have more torque theory and therefore you use different gearing and props based on torque. I believe HP is HP no matter what the engine you have. If a particular gas boat runs well with a certain prop turning a certain RPM, in order for the diesel to make the boat perform equally as well you need to gear the engine to turn that same prop at that same speed. Once you adjust the gearing so the prop speed is the same then a 750 hp gas has the same torque at the prop or into the drive as a 750 hp diesel!

I know that doesn’t answer your question exactly, but take how fast the skater runs with 750 gas engines and figure how much speed you would loose for the added weight and that is speed with 750 diesels.

The Seatek engines, we had the protos to what they build nowadays. The engine itself was very good, the bad points were the cam belt, with heavy throttling they would stretch, when they stretch the vales hit the pistons and you know the rest – change belts often!!! Also we had oil cooler o-ring problem, engines fill with water because the oil cooler were internal to the oil pans. They (race engines) were very low compression, hard to start and dirty, very dirty. From what I see of the new engines, I would buy them.

My arch rival in V was the Doller Marine Apache 41. She was a non-stepped Apache with 1,000 hp engines (maybe). We ran a twin step bottom with a wing, Trimax drives and twin 850-900 hp diesels. The Apache could run maybe 2-4 mph faster than us in calm water – thus HP = HP, gas = diesel

I hope this makes sense to you?

I'll throw in my opinion about "Duramax" engines. If and I say if they are the same as the pick-up engine they can't be bullet-proof as those engines can not compare structure wise to what aftermarket gas engine builders have available. You hot rod those little engines to 600hp or 800hp and they will blow up faster than your gas engines. Time will only tell about this, but history tends to repeats itself.

How are they keeping the rods in the duramaxes, or the pistons together? 800hp duramx on the dyno chunked rods next one pistons cracked. all with fuel only no nitrous added.

carillo has connecting rods and so cal diesel has pistons that will hold up they also have cnc ported heads and cams

Watch Innovation Marines Progress, Seatek Service Center. Fulltime Guys Doing Dyno Work. Was Just There A Week Ago

ah didnt know that socal had the pistons, knew about the heads,cam, and rods how we fixed up the rod part, but the pistons would just piss us off

I like the idea of going diesels,I think its the future, its just a matter of time.its been proven in europe for a long time,and at the rate things are going in the states there is no way out. Gasoline at 5 bucks ,and big motors not lasting more than 100 hours after paying 80k a piece,I think everybody should be looking to develop some bad ass diesel configurations.....