got my curiosity up, ZF Hurth and Paragon(?) Wow, they are proud of those! Velvet drives on Ebay could be had under $1k. I thought I paid to much for my other complete setup, looks like a hell of a deal now!

There are BW 72C's out there. You just gotta look. Any good trans shop can rebuild them.

Wannabe

I'm pretty sure Kaama drives are straight thru. If thats the case, then a down angle trans would work the best, such as the Twin Disc.

Those zf twin discs are some fancy little units .can't speak from experience , but looks like you will have to flip the motors around and go v drive to get the output shafts low enough then you have to figure out adapting the gear ratio to match available surface drive props .be a neat engineering feat if it could be pulled off

Twin discs come in fork lifts right? Maybe scrap out a couple of those.

Just now realized there is a guy I know in town that may have these or some hurth variants I am going to his place soon anyway for some v drive stuff ,going to take lots and lots of pictures .I do remember seeing a pair of counter rotating 426's there as well as big yanmar diesels

Twin Disc does have a modern replacement for the 502. I don't know the model off hand but if it's newer and more common might be a little cheaper? I do know it has more power/ rpm capacity and would actually be the way to go if you wanted original type components setup. One of the other more common names in marine transmissions also came out with a model with a lower output shaft height but I forget who it is and don't know how compatible it would be. Dan M. at Archer had crash boxes for them once upon a time. He might be a good person to ask about your plan. Edit- I had my 502's rebuilt by a Twin Disc dealer and it was so expensive you probably wouldn't believe me, so I understand why everyone wants a fortune for them.

Forgot about having to reverse rotation on one side

can you explain your comment? Did you mean "Forget about reversing a 72C" because they cant do that or did you mean "forget about having to reverse direction because its not necessary"? If the later is what you meant lets hear why? I actually asked this question a while ago (http://www.offshoreonly.com/forums/d...direction.html) and pretty much most people said the boat would pull really hard to one side.....