Only vertical shafts lately....but I've been cheating.

Now if they had kept the TRS, and made some shorty lowers for them, that would have been cool.


I believe merc did experiment with that but they actually built a few prototype 4" shorter uppers for the TRS I know because I still Have 2 of them with speedy type lowers. they will go in a small twin engine Cat with real big HP.

Call it what you want guys , but the fact remains that between the crappy drives and the junk headers and a few other unspecified problems Merc has done less than a satisfactory job of keeping their equipment running the way they were expected to perform by the public ....... Dont think I am ever going to buy another boat and I have been lucky over the years to have what I have had ..... But if I do it will not be a Merc set-up !!!!!!!!!!!!!



Jim

Everything at Least Twice!
Ok maybe I have not killed a Lower CASE!
But then again??? I lose count

ditto

i only broke 1 lower, personally i had 250+ hours on it, but i was told it was original and had 472 total.

Boatless--
To address your point- if I converted over to Arnesons or SCX's to eliminate problems,I would be spending 75% or more of the boats total value. You obviously missed the fact that I am headed towards having an option for the 1000's of bravo's out there today. So the way I look at it is with my parts, maybe your drive will last 3-5 times longer or may never break again for a reasonable amount of money.

And if you didn't want to attend the AA meeting, why did you open the door and walk in ????

Imco SC's behind Procharged 500efis
EVERYTHING except the case some parts including upper and lower gears multiple times
Baby the sticks and change fluid 15hrs follow all "bravo driving" advice with no increase in life

chewed up countless lower gears (15+ sets) , sheared off 2 prop shafts and 3 vertical shafts, all billet good stuff. Scalloped one xr soft upper pinion gear in 50 hours but found it on inspection and swapped it out, sheared the floor out of 1 xr upper gear that was mistakenly modified for a bigger bearing which in turned weakened the gear. Currently something is chewed up in my xr somewhere but haven't gotten time yet to pull it off and see since boating season ended. With the max worx tower and all their other stuff I have over 400 hours on my xr gears in my upper at 750-1100 hp, Smitty

How does the xr differ from the bravo 1? I am building a new 600hp motor for my 280 velocity that has a b1 and have heard of guys running 700 hp with stock b1 with out to many problems. Is it due to the 280 being a light boat? I'm still new to this, but was under the impression the xr drive was an upgrade to the b1.

In my industry we have transmission failers when using stock gears behind the high hp bike motors we build. Years ago we started cryoing gear seats and found that to extend the amount of power the gears would hold by about 10-15%. Still in need of stronger gear sets we started having complete billet gear and output shafts made up. The billet seems to be about 50-55% stronger than factory gears. Are there no options like this for boats? Or has it been tried and doesn't work.

For the bolts stretching problem. Why not have arp make up a set of bolts. I'm sure they can make a stronger option. I have an account with them if someone were interested in experimenting with having a bolt made.