Originally Posted by HabanaJoe (Post 2756622)

Jassman,

What I talk about is not unproven? It was done for many years and I was along side Buzzi in the boat teaching me and my guys!!! I was at the old Buzzi shop, have parts in my house still have Buzzi drives, etc, etc, etc. I had Ebel at my disposal to run and test and play with everyday, not once in awhile but everyday. We kept Ebel on our private marine railway (like a lift) in Morgan NJ so we could launch and retrive her anytime we wanted. The guy with those Aquadrive CV shafts who is now with Mack Boring (Yanmar distributor) has a poster in Mack Boring of me in the Gancia bilge.

Funny Reggie Fountain story. Back in 1994 or 1995? Reggie made a walk around fishboat with a Merc 7.3L diesel sterndrive package in it and as is the norm the boat was slow, much slower than he wanted. Reggie had me come down to the plant give them all kinds of advise on how to make this boat faster - did they take it - NO!!! They tried nothing because it didn't make sense to them so they removed the diesel installed a gas engine and sold the boat.

Just because other people don't do it doesn't mean it's not viable or hasn't been done with success by others. I've talked to Hustler lierally 20 years ago, they were stuck in the America way of doing things period.

The peeve has always been boat builders don't want to build a boat and spend $300,000 and if it doesn't work they can't sell it. If they have to re-rig it with different engines and drives to sell it then they just put more in a boat then it could ever be worth. They would have been better off just crushing it and walking away. Many boat companies do not build boats that they ultimately can't sell if it's flop.

The only person who I can truely say was open to ideas, listened, watched and took time out to come ride on the diesels was Craig Barrie (I have great respect for him). His early Cigarette diesel projcts with Merlins were not what he hoped for. He was so impressed by us that there was a deal to do Hawk Diesel power in the early 90's. Many factors killed it but none of them were the product itself or the performance. I still have the letter from Hawk sealed and post marked, they faxed me a copy before hand so I never open the orginal and today I have the sealed one for sake of "what could have been".

As for throttleing despite was T2X says with the old mechanical diesels there was alot of throttling. Not the kind you did with gas but throttleing to keep boost up. I can see your point with electronics that throttleing could all but disapppear? But if you try to throttle a diesel boat like a gas boat nothing happens except you loose boost and it falls on it's face.

Everyone on here that was around in the late 80's and early 90's remembers the Buzzi boats running in Key West and AC in really rough water. Did they not blast by the American gas powered boats in the rough? If diesels weren't good in the rough that would ahve never happened. Again, there is a trick to running them and you got to get gasoline engines out of the brain to do it, what don't know does electronics make this impossible?

Getting on plane, I would have thought the electronics would have made that much better than the mechanicals as we used to be able to load them with so much fuel that they would just bog down, start smoking like it was on fire and drop to idle.


Don, anytime is good today or tomorrow or at night before 11 pm.

Joe Gere

Originally Posted by Jassman (Post 2756792)

As to getting on plane..taking that few seconds to have the computor react is what bothered me.

Originally Posted by 29Firefox (Post 2757390)

It's not the puter. With the common rail sytems the fuel is there before you can even think it. The lag is in the air catching up to the fuel :drink: