Quote Originally Posted by WILDMAN View Post
Remember how bad the 20ft LCB ran with a 400? He ran 114 with a 300x and the best he saw with the 400 was 101. It's a full tunnel boat.
Quote Originally Posted by JPEROG View Post
He actually ran 120 with his LCB fishing boat and a stock X. The 400 was a disaster. Out of all of the boats tested at Fat Cat, one out of seven was faster with a single 400R Vs a single 300XS.
Hey, guys, how about we try to help this SNF brother who is pioneering uncharted territory and could use some help. I can't think of two more knowledgeable guys that could have useful input on this.

The fact that one Fat Cat actually was faster with a 400R says 6 other setups were wrong, so how about we figure out what was RIGHT on that one, instead of the ones that tried to set them up "like they always did". This family of engines has been around since 2004, and now that the Sportmaster case exists, collectively we should be able to help EngineerMike out and the whole board shares the knowledge at his expense. There's over 75,000 Verados in the world, sooner or later they're going to be a potential power supply for our 20'+ projects. Whaddya say?

I'm going to guess on the 20 LCB the CG wasn't made to match what the 300X was, and there's not much boat length to recover it. Grant has already proven that the 400ROS to 400R conversion had no difference on Matt Rice's 368 Skater, but nobody seems to want to talk about that. It's a matter of time before this community figures out what a single cat with a centerpod likes. Wildman, you yourself had positive gains on the 21 Liberator over a 300XS, do you see anything obvious that EngineerMike should be paying attention to? What did you find the 400R wanted different for props compared to 300XS?

The single 400R is lighter than a pair of 2.5's so the "it's too heavy" statement doesn't hold water, either. Maybe these things just like 500+ HP to be happy? Eli's seemed to run pretty well with his different combinations on it.

My guess is props, CG, setback and engine height will need to be varied a bunch to come up with the correct combination. Unfortunately, I've modified my center pod by notching more than 5' of it out of my boat, and just got it back from interior as the water froze here, so I can't share setup stuff until spring. I can tell you that once on the water, I definitely will. I didn't like the -3* angle the centerpod had, as I believe it acts like dragging a tab, so I was convinced to remove it.

Let's see if we can't give some support for a positive experience instead of telling the guy his $30K experiment "will never work". One of my guys at work has a saying that I've adopted: "Can't means you don't want to..."