surface drives on a 30 = wild ride
 

I am switching my drives out next winter on my 30 which has #2's on it and was thinking about surface drives.......called steve stepp today but he wont be in until monday. Im going to see what he has to say about it, but I am thinking it would be a hot ticket....anybody disagree or does anybody know of a velocity with twin surface drives??????

I talked to Steve many, many years ago about putting Arneson 1600's on my 30. It had not been done at that time but he figure it could be. You'd have to use wedge plates to compensate for transom angle. The 30 was plenty fast enough anyway and I really didn't see any reason to pursue it. You can break 100 with 500hp a side and any much faster you'll run out of bottom anyway.

One other thing- you put Arneson's on it with drop boxes and the props are right together. You'll end up with the engines up high which will make for a high CG which isn't going to be a positive at 100+ and it wants to start chine walking. Backing up isn't going to be fun either.

I don't know why someone would put 1600's on the boat as they are what 30 yrs old now. Also they are as you pointed out a far more complicated install than what is available today.

The #7M's solve all these problems.

Rik

There's a clue hidden in that sentence.

I understand that, but reference to today and mounting huge drop boxes is a way outdated option and arrangement.

Back in the day, the engines were not mounted high with the chain boxes as the geometry of the engines to sit side by side and have a 18" center line on the propellers means the engines cannot be that far off the bottom. The center distance of the side by side (big block non log manifolds) is 34.5" same as it is today. 31 degree mounting of the 1600's is 13.46" off the bottom. A bravo sets the the engine 16" up depending on X


The only thing of benefit of the 1600's were that Bonner had made a counter rotating unit. But then again the 1721/ASD6 was available at the same time.