Yes Dan , their would be lots of space to actually change it in place. I have heard of the opti issue's with condensation but a friend of mine who because of budget became very familiar with making big power on LT1's tells me that the first version of the opti was really bad because it had no vent at all and would condensate badly , then it evolved into a version that had a vacuum port to suck air through it to keep it dry and then the last version that has a simple vent that gets flooded when the water pump leaks on it like you said.... Because the motors are so cheap and I have access to one with very low mileage and spring upgrades and valve retainer I would be tempted to try. I am also considering running SBC manifolds or if I can find mild perfomance marine manifolds.

The other problems with the opti he was telling me was simply the wheel trigger coming off the shaft from not being loctite in place.

I could be wrong on the vented versions vs non vented but something like that :P

Is there video of this boat running I haven't seen somewhere??

That's an awesome looking boat and the rigging looks just as good!

hmm, if you aren't taking the boat way out in the ocean then I say go for it. I was looking at pictures of some LT1s in master crafts and it looks like they had a coil pack bolted to one of the heads rather than running the opti. If the opti doesn't hold up then maybe switch over to the set up that master craft uses. Here is a pretty clear picture of the master craft set up...

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m...psfxatxrdm.jpg

They use a Deltek conversion , my friend ran one of those LTCC conversion kits with LS1 coil pack instead but that was only to take the Spark out of the opti and still used the opti's trigger wheel and sensor. From what I can understand that's just to prevent spark scatter when running big numbers.

That is correct this is a lake boat a 24' Progression.

If you have to have headers...but...there are good manifold systems for the LS's for 1G +/- a few hundred.

Let me know where I can find those , I have been looking but without success... so I keep going back to standard SBC head port manifold or headers. If I could get my hands on a cheap set of ls fitting exhaust I would do an LS

Check with Kem Equipment....they are the Kodiac Marine place. They sell a bunch of marinized NA and SC LS Motors for the NW jet pump crowd. I checked with them about 5-6 yrs ago and was a few $$$ short of $1k at the time.

The LT1 heads were the test bed for cylinder head technology that ended up in the vortec truck motors. I would bet there is absolutely no gains running an LT1 vs a 350 Vortec setup.

Here s one when I had a black hawk on running 29 props doing 95 mph @ 6500 but ended up whit a imco-3" as the hull have not enough natural bow lift .
There are more vids from different set ups as we started whit normal bravo and then a BH and then the imco and several different props , so far the stock bravo 28" was the fastest 96 mph

http://youtu.be/Dh1AVt_vc28

I emailed them this morning will see what they have to offer , if the cost is decent I may end up switching to an LS platform.