After $42,000 in Bravo XR repairs over 4 years, earlier this year after meeting Rik at Arneson Surface Drives in San Rafael we decided to put an end to the bleeding & remove the XR's and replace with ASD7M's.
Tom at Pro Marine in Lake Havasu City, AZ is doing the upgrade. We fiberglassed in the old XR drive & exhaust holes in the transom since we needed to drop the engines down by 9 1/4 inches and move each engine 4" to the outside.
The project started on May 1 and were now wrapping up the upgrade with an exhaust modification which also had to be dropped several inches & customized to fit due to the swim deck.
The engines are Flattop 572's 1000 HP each. It took me $42,000 worth of repairs to figure out that the XR's should not have been installed in this boat, even though they were upgraded with every option Max Machine Worx offered, the HP far exceeded it's limits.
Were looking forward to putting the boat in the water this week for a fun test run. I now have 2 XR drives with standoff boxes should anyone with a lower HP application (suggest 650HP or less) have interest, please contact me.
Rik at Arneson was a great help and answered all of our questions and is easy to reach any time. A prop purchase is up next & he is suggesting Rolla 17 or 17.5 x 34" 5 Blade Cleavers. I will be calling on him again this week.
To my knowledge this is the first Magic 34 foot Cat XR to Arneson surface drive conversion ever completed and possibly the first Arneson surface drive installed on any Magic Powerboat.

To the guy (Goin Nuts) that sent me the message about the XR's, your mail box is full & I cannot reply.

What boxes do you have, Hyd. steering?

Will you sell them seperate?

Hi Tinkerer,

At this time I will take a reasonable offer on the stand off boxes & XR Drives. I have both of them at this time. If you want to make an offer on the box and or drives, I would be happy to consider it. You asked for a link to some photos, here is a link http://www.x-tremescooters.com/boat/ and you can see the drives as were installed on the boat before I installed the Arneson's.

Regards & sorry for the late reply, I will reply quickly on your next reply,

Greg M.

How did the new drives work out?

You still have the XR Drives for Sale?

Yea! SHow some Pictures!!!!!

Damn... Why didn't that work?

He has pics of his boat on his website, just nothing with the updated drives... I tried to post one directly on here, but it didn't work for some reason. Helluva nice boat...

So how did the boat respond to the Arnesons? I am planning on a conversion for my 35 Motion but am a little concerned as the Motion liked a little positive trim with my engines as far forward as they are.