If you make your pad completely flat, please let us know your results. I also have a 251, and was always curious to why they didn't make the pad completely flat,like on the Checkmate Eluder I grew up on. Rough water ride is my guess.

Superboat on Long Island added steps years ago! I believe engine builder Rich Zul owned boat?

Open87 I put a notch in my 1985 cigarette flat a number of years ago as I put ssm5 drives on as well . I have a thread in the cigarette forum believe it or not called " how to put notch in a flat deck " give it look it might shead some insight as to how much work it is . But for
me it was worth it .
Cheers Rick G.

Will do and you are correct.

Flat pad = speed but pounding in rough water.
The width of the pad has a huge effect on this.
I will keep my narrow (5 1/2") to keep the sea keeping abilities while still retaining the flat pad.

Downside is the narrower they are the harder it is to balance/keep the boat on the pad at speed.
Im OK w/that though as I much prefer a boat that rewards driver iunput.

I grew up flying pad bottom, O/B powered vees.
Not much better.

Heres a 17' Hydrostream Vector w/a workbench OMC @ 101.

Will Smith's 29 Phantom started life as a 27/28 Magnum ( basically same bottom as 28 Pantera/Cig , ect.). His pad/strake design provided additional speed without hurting rough water performance, as this became a proven race winner.

12 years ago i added a pad to our 37ft Hunton XRS, it is fitted with quite heavy diesel engines and needed more stern lift worked out extremely well. Always looking for more speed and fuel economy i recently decided to add to the width of the pad using Iroko which i pre-finished with epoxy then bonded on to the hull, the new addition has 1/2" of rocker built into the rear over the last 3ft this is giving lots more lift to the point where i am having to make 1" spacers for the drives as i am running out of prop grip.

It is, when the boat was new it picked up water from the nose cone of the drives along with lots of weed and i wasn't getting the volume i required for the modified engines so i built my own system. I also converted all the coolers on the engines to single pass and linked the various coolers with 2" bore titanium pipe, the long pieces on top of the engine are jacketed along their entire length with internal baffles between the skins and are used as fuel coolers, so we have fuel at seawater temperature makes quite a difference to power and fuel economy.

Cool stuff Pete.

And forgive me for saying it was a coyote on the first page