Originally Posted by
Hotboat
Ok She's, here's what happened with my F26/TCM800. This is my particular boat, not to be confused with any other boat, any other makers boat, or even another DCB F26.
A few years ago I grenaded my Teague drive. Blew the snout off the sucker and jammed the drive shaft in to the coupler. After talking to a few people, Kap suggested looking in to a SCX. As far as I knew, no one at the time had put a SCX of a F26. Figured I may as well be the first. So I talked to Imco and decided to take the plunge. Upper, helmet, reservoir, you know the pocketbook drill. Took my boat to someone in Havi, damned if I can remember who. Had them install the Helmet and drive. I reused my old SC lower after I had MMW check it out.
Took the boat to Parker, dropped it in, and it immediately had a vibration I didn't like. Talked to a few more people and came to the conclusion the coupler was bad. Took the boat back to Havi, yanked the engine and replaced the coupler. Ok, now I'm ready to actually test this thing.
Initially I put my 32 back on. I almost couldn't roll the boat over. I mean it was seriously a problem. So went back and put the 30 on. The boat rolled over, but the entire handling characteristic of the boat changed. It felt noting like it did before. F26's hop. Mine hopped between 65-70. They all do. But now it was hopping all the way up to 85 and the handling was almost out of control. I tried everything I knew to get it to calm down. Not like I was driving a new to me boat, I had probably a couple hundred hours of seat time by now.
So I trailered the boat and started looking at the SCX very closely. At the time I didn't have a Merc drive to compare it to, so I took a bunch or measurements and pictures and went home. Other than the upper bearing housing and cav plate, the drives measure identical. My X dim wasn't affected, the prop hub was essentially in the same exact location as it was with the Merc drive. So I moved on to the cav plate. The SCX plate is much larger than the Merc cav plate. By the way, Imco was involved throughout this process, and they were extremely helpful. Great bunch of experienced guys to work with.
I suggested the cav plate was causing the handling issues on my particular boat. Imco suggested trimming the plate so it was more inline with the stock merc drive. At this point I made another executive decision. I asked Imco if they would take the drive back and refund my money. They did. Again, awesome people to work with.
I came to the conclusion that my particular boat simply did not agree with the SCX for a couple of reasons. I think if I was running a little more horsepower I could have overcome the additional HP the SCX requires. And with some slight modifications to the cav plate, I might have been able to solve the handling issues. Neither of which I was willing to do. My boat handled like I wanted it to prior to blowing up the original drive. And I didn't want to change that or have to do strange things to get it back to where I liked it.
So I bought two complete MMW drives and rotate them around every 15-20hrs. A full tear down when the oil needs to be changed saves me a little money LOL.
