Back in the early 80s Butch Ryan had great success with turbo charged engines in his S class Active marine cat" Express" Also Al Copland ran Banks turbo engines as well in his early days of offshore...

front mount intercooler, wide band o2 system, lots of Duttweiler parts, T4 turbo (which got replaced by a T-76 after i sold it)..... ran hard, i wouldn't mind two of those in the back of my boat either... easy 650-700 HP all day, add in a big water to air intercooler, good fuel and turn up the boost.... 900-1000 easy... why don't people do this? i am pumped now...

I think closed course racing made them impractical,they can't come off the turns like a supercharger

how about poker run/pleasure boating... if you could control the turbo heat (easy enough) i would think there would be more pluses than minuses.... smaller, lighter engines, more effecient, more power, sweet sound......

I know marine diesels are running turbos, so the fiberglass question should be answered already.....

Now I feel kind of silly.
I just realized the thread was about TURBOS not TURBINES.

D'OH!

I would imagine it is tough to find a drive that can handle the power. However my knowledge of drives is very limited. A few more reasons are as follows:

Availability
knowledge, not too many people understand turbos
They aren't as pretty as a blower

The lag factor, Back when turbos were used with carburetors you had to pressurize the whole carburetor inside and out, add another carb and you had to build a big box for this. This massive box left little room for an intercooler and it was a lot of volume to keep the pressure in. Everytime you let off the throttle the charge would have to escape the box or it would blow all of the fuel in the carb into the intake. Once you went back on the throttle you had to wait for that massive box to come up to pressure. They tried draw-thru systems (1980 Turbo Trans AM) but all of that whipping of the wet air/fuel mix made for terrible atomization. I mean there was not much fuel left by the time it got to the combustion chamber. Add an intercooler to a system like that and it would make problems worse.

Roby

Iggy: If you hadn't admitted that, I doubt anyone would have really noticed.

i think surface drives would be perfect for a large HP turbo motor.... put closed cooling on it for all the aluminum parts, big intercooler, twin turbo (seq would limit lag), you wouldn't even need big blocks to run 800-1000 HP... and the best part, no noise violations...

Wasn't there an aluminum Gifford Marine cat that had turbo engines a while back?

Also, I remember reading about a crazy experimental engine project from back in the 80's that was backed by Mercruiser. (?) I believe the Ghallager/Kaiser Systems cat was the test bed for the engines. Anyone remember if those were turbocharged, or did they use a blower?

As far as drives are concerned. It seems like they should be able to come up with something. Wouldn't a shaft drive like a BPM or Trimax hold up?