I'm going to send them for a rebuild to make the drives stronger, and install an extra drive shower on the part of the upper housing that goes towards the shield to get better cooling overall. In principle, the rebuild will be very similar to how IMCO is built.

thanks for the good tips on drive guardians, there will be some flights with the boat so building in as much protection as possible is good, so there will be those too

Good decision. I snapped many XRs with between 700-800hp going through them. Once the guardians were installed, they didn't even have shavings in the fluid.

I'm not a certified marine tech, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. XRs have a single shaft while IMCO have dual, correct? Makes a huge difference in durability.