Anyone with experience with this drive?

You can read a lot about the BlackHawk over at donzi.net.

About 300hrs of experience so far. What do you want to know?

The BH & Bravo both use the same gimble housing. The BH has a higher x dimension & has counter rotaing props. The BH is a good fast drive for the right boat like a 20 cig or a donzi classic.. The B1 parts are readily available, the BH parts are hard to get unless you look for used.. Any other Q&A fire away.. Jamie / Lakeside

Props can be hard to come by so be careful!

Julie

The boat is a 87 - 26ft Scarab with pad.
Weight dont know for sure yet. Approx 4000-4500lbs I think.
Is this boat too heavy for BH?
Any idea of pitch with 350Mag 300hp+?
Any idea of top speed?
Frank..

If you're talking single small block, forget the BH drive. You will never plane the sucker off. BH drives absorb a ton of torque to break the props free and get over the hump. If its twins, probably 27 pitch props.

I worked with Gary Meisenberg, the lead behind the Blackhawk project in the mid-1990's. My efforts were on a twin BB 30' Scarab I was racing in B Class. After a week at Lake-X, bottom work on the boat, a second trip to the Mercury plant in OK for more testing, use of 10-15 pr of one-off custom props, adjustable X-dimension with boxes, I gave up. The performance was virtually identical and the re-entry on launch with the counter rotating twin props was really hard on the Bravo based internals. I locked up the Bravo clutches once just going into gear at idle.
From my prospective, the best thing that came out of this effort was that Mercury started to upgrade the Bravo internal parts to withstand the additional stresses created by the Blackhawk design. The props and related cost were also going to be a long term problem.