Hey Tom,

Still in the garage... winter project for this winter. I'll need to re-do my tonneau cover, so have been putting the job off. Looking forward to having more advertising space for Konrad, and others.

Cheers,
Brian

In your opinion, what are the best upgrades for the dollar?

RIght now I am upgrading my new XR's with;

1) deburring and cryogenically treating all the shafts and gears.

2)Upgrading the bearings that need caged bearings.

3)And adding a Max Billet cap.

I know there is lots more to do but where does it become cost ineffective? as you stated, they will break eventually.

The Konrads are tough.

That sounds like a good plan,i would also add the max worx upper to lower vert shaft coupler,the other big mod is their power towers in the uppers,i'm not sure if anyones breaking the upgraded xr towers that replaced the failure prone bravo aluminum towers,Smitty

What are your feelings on the u-joints?

One sick Gladiator (Rick) had one let go with 40 hours on it.

Is this a common failure?

Depends how much you fly with it.

With ITS there is a lot of potential damage possible. Would you upgrade Thinking of an insurance policy so to speak?

After 50 hours of time on my XR's I had them dis-assembled by "Mr.Gadgets" and we found that the pinion gears were beginning to go away and needed replacement. We also found a u-joint going away as well. Still another thing we found was a missing fiber washer/shim that goes in between the gimble ring and bellows housing. We think the fiber washer/shim was overlooked by the Merc factory and never installed----it's a VERY easy thing to miss! I believe this is the reason why I had a vibration in the drives while attempting to plane off and while coming off plane. We think it was a sort of vilolent "fish tailing" motion. The props were in excellent shape---lab finished, etc. Once on plane everything felt smooth and no vibration that I could feel.

THE DOMINO EFFECT---We also believe that the drive with the missing fiber washer/shim also caused one of the female splines (where the outdrive shaft goes into) within the Stellings extension boxes to wear pre-maturely and also needed replacement. The splines on the male part (drive shaft) looked fine. The vibration caused the Simrek drive shower to crack and break off on that particular drive as well. It was telling me something, but I couldn't figure out what it was until I spoke with the owner of Simrek. He is an engineer and was very helpful---I think his name is Paul. He told me his drive showers are like tuning forks---that if they crack or break then something is going on with the drives, i.e. mis-alignment, not towed in correctly, etc, etc.

Through it all, I believe the external steering I had with the super heavy duty double wing plates kept things from going into a disaster both safety wise, and parts.

I am still learning with all this, but I believe I am a good student and I am hopefully becoming wiser as time goes on with this stuff. The part I don't enjoy is finding out the hard way.

I have 2 outdrives for my single engine boat,a max machine upgraded stock bravo and a max maxhine upgraded xr,i swap them out as parts fail or maintenance is needed. One has stock bravo ujoints and cardigan joint(i think thats what you call it),the other has xr joints and cardigan joint,both have billet input yokes. When i had about 150 hours on stock bravo joints i started getting a vibration and thought i had a ujoint going bad,i pulled drive off and noticed some (.020-040) play in ujoints up and down in yokes and center piece. I changed the ujoints and it was the same still,i carefully used a ujoint press and squeezd the yokes tighter to the snap rings on ujoints,the max billet yoke was still tight though,and all the vibration was gone. My boat doesn't really wind out and get the last 8 mph out of it unless you trim it to the max which is probably what spread the yokes apart,the xr joint assembly has never done this,i'm running a blown 540 turning a 30 pitch prop,hasn't ever outright broke the joints or center piece,i think you'lll be okay,just check for play up and down in joints when you do your annual inspection of coupler and outdrive,Smitty

Hey 2112
what up
The U joint that let go was on the froward motor But the damage to that U joint could been done by one or all of us. all of us were hard on this set up
1)CIg running the boat to see how it runs( 1-2 hrs)
2) Lip Ship running the sh#t out of it to see how it runs (112 mph) (8 -10 hrs)
3) Hot Boat running the sh#t out of it (109.9 mph) ( 2-3 hrs)
4) Then you got me running it real slow nothing less then (100 mph) 25 - 30 hrs
when the u joint let go. I had drives at 3 1/2 - 4 at WFO


Rick OSG