History of the speedmaster drive?

[Dunbar 104]

I know a little bit about the #6 and the #3s but what about all the others?

When did they come out?

What did they cost?

What is the differences from one model to the next model?

Where there over lapping models?

How strong are the old ones?

[glassdave]

I know a little bit about the #6 and the #3s but what about all the others?

When did they come out?

right after the Volvo E drive

much like all of Merc's innovations



I have a really cool ad in an old magazine that shows the #6 when it was the K drive built by Kiekhaffer. If memory serve it was Carl next to it in some kind of safari outfit and i believe it was referred to the Gorilla drive or something like that. Anyone know the story behind that?

[FastDonzi]

I remeber the first full size #6 was Wood (No Sh!t) it was a full sized model. I believe over on S&F theres a thread on history of the speed masters (or something like that) and yeah, check with the patent office, usually when someones patant ran out and it was something merc wanted to use they Pounced on it.

[T2x]

right after the Volvo E drive

much like all of Merc's innovations



I have a really cool ad in an old magazine that shows the #6 when it was the K drive built by Kiekhaffer. If memory serve it was Carl next to it in some kind of safari outfit and i believe it was referred to the Gorilla drive or something like that. Anyone know the story behind that?

As the story goes and I believe it, Charlie Strang, then VP of engineering at Kiekhaefer Mercury, invented the stern drive and showed it to the old man. Carl wasn't interested so Charlie back doored it through Jim Wynne to Volvo. After Volvo proved there was a market, Mercruiser debuted with a much more robust series of drives. Volvo played a little with SSM's but never really made any progress with them. Mercury had significant experience with racing outboard lowers (10 Hurricane "quickies" ( short for Quicksilver) through the speedmasters on the in line 6 outboards). The natural evolution was to build an Offshore Sterndrive Speedmaster and they followed a progression of numbers, 1 through 5. After Carl left Mercury he formed Kiekhaefer Aeromarine and tried to produce a big heavy duty drive (referred to above) which had virtually no acceptance. After his death Fred K. and his team developed the "K Drive" , which, after Kiekhaefer Aeromarine was purchased by Mercury Marine thereby closing the circle, became the #6 drive. Since then it has been upgraded to the dry sump, swept skeg variant available to this day. It is still the standard against which all others are measured and is the reigning "King of the Hill".

Giving Volvo credit for the development of the stern drive to today's standards is probably not merited as they did little more than take a cast off Kiekhaefer Mercury project and introduce it to the public.

P.S. You really don't want to compare the innovations that Mercury has created internally to any other vendor in the marine market. There is absolutely no contest, and second place is so far down the list as to be laughable.

T2x

[glassdave]

Since then it has been upgraded to the dry sump, swept skeg variant available to this day.

T2x

Thanks, that kinda illustrates my point. So who developed those two upgrades anyway?



This is turning into a great thread. Good info even if it stray off the Speedmaster subject a bit.

[Anchored]

From the Volvo museum.

Jeff

[FastDonzi]

Thanks, that kinda illustrates my point. So who developed those two upgrades anyway?



This is turning into a great thread. Good info even if it stray off the Speedmaster subject a bit.

I believe wiseman (sp?) "Clustergear" is responsible for the dry sump IIRC

[Dude! Sweet!]

I believe wiseman (sp?) "Clustergear" is responsible for the dry sump IIRC

Pat goes by "Shifter" on here.

[T2x]

Thanks, that kinda illustrates my point. So who developed those two upgrades anyway?



This is turning into a great thread. Good info even if it stray off the Speedmaster subject a bit.

The dry sump concept obviously came from Weismann funded by the Victory team. The 6 drive application of the concept (internal pump, etc) was developed by Mercury (Weismann reportedly did some consulting work but Fred K says they had little involvement in the ultimate engineering and technique).

The Swept Skeg is a tough one. Hering did some modified skegs on the early 6's. However Hering was originally a Mercury employee and learned much of his propeller blade and hydrodynamic concepts at Mercury racing, but prior to that he was champion OB hydro racer and probably brought a lot of tricks to Mercury as well...this certainly muddies the water IMHO.

T2x

[Rik]

The dry sump concept obviously came from Weismann funded by the Victory team. The 6 drive application of the concept (internal pump, etc) was developed by Mercury (Weismann reportedly did some consulting work but Fred K says they had little involvement in the ultimate engineering and technique).

The Swept Skeg is a tough one. Hering did some modified skegs on the early 6's. However Hering was originally a Mercury employee and learned much of his propeller blade and hydrodynamic concepts at Mercury racing, but prior to that he was champion OB hydro racer and probably brought a lot of tricks to Mercury as well...this certainly muddies the water IMHO.

T2x

Tom Gentry dry sumped the #4 years before anyone else had even thought of doing it. In fact he dry sumped everything he could in the power train years before others.

Team Victory ran the #6's with no oil in the drive units for qualifying then Pat dry sumped the drive.

Skeg. Jerry G. takes credit for that along with a lot more.

[Ratickle]

this certainly muddies the water IMHO.

T2x

We can't start having muddy water in Offshore Racing. Can We??????


Are the 3A assemblys able to hold the 5 foot if you wanted to raise X Dimension without redoing the transom?

[Geronimo36]

right after the Volvo E drive

much like all of Merc's innovations

Giving Volvo credit for the development of the stern drive to today's standards is probably not merited as they did little more than take a cast off Kiekhaefer Mercury project and introduce it to the public.
T2x

Speedmaster aside, Merc ripped-off Volvo's shiftable sterndrive with the Bravo....
http://www.volvo.com/volvopenta/glob...57774&sl=en-gb

[Brownie]

I showed the very first Volvo 200 drive on a 16' Donzi at the Jacksonville Boat Show in November 1964. Bill Steele and Joe Swift of Mercury offered me money and Ho's if I would swing by Lake X on the way home. No dice!

[Ratickle]

This looks really interesting.....


No can of worms here.....

Why the 3, 4, 5, 6, 3A, 6 dry, etc in the speedmaster lineup?

And then of course, the duo-prop/BlackHawk?

And Ben has a boat up there with a SternDrive speedmaster style drive on it.

[catman]

This looks really interesting.....


No can of worms here.....

Why the 3, 4, 5, 6, 3A, 6 dry, etc in the speedmaster lineup?

And then of course, the duo-prop/BlackHawk?

And Ben has a boat up there with a SternDrive speedmaster style drive on it.

Dont forget the SSM #7

[Tank]

Speaking of cut down SSM#3's...A buddy had a 98 38 Scarab with #3's that had the skegs cut off on it. They were purchased from Bob Teague who had them on the straight bottom yellow Fountain for a long time in the late 80's early 90's. Bob upgraded the boat to #6's.


Here's an interesting article in Powerboat magazine, written by Matt Trulio (who's a member here). Great article, however, as I recall there was a rebuttal letter written by Weisman where they explained Weisman really wasn't the creator of the #6. I can't find the letter, but it was printed in PBM.

o well-branded is the super-tough No. 6 dry-sump drive from Mercury Racing that people tend to forget it began its life as an innovative creation from Weismann Marine.
power_0309_a.jpgThat’s right—for those of you who are too young to know this stuff or too old to remember any of it—Mercury Racing purchased the technology from the innovative Costa Mesa, Calif., company. Mercury refined the drive and was able to produce it at a volume Weismann Marine never could, but the concept, design and prototypes were straight from the fertile minds of Pat and Chris Weismann, the brothers who own and run Weismann Marine.

The Weismann brothers come by their inventive brain matter honestly—their father, Peter Weismann, and legendary offshore racer John Connor developed the patented Kaama drive that helped propel racer Betty Cook to several offshore world championships in the 1970s and 1980s. So for the Weismanns, innovation is in the blood.

More recently, the brothers teamed up to build a unique engine-and-drive package in AVR (Advanced Vessel Research), a 39-foot Extreme formerly named Ettore. The boat was originally powered by a pair of Paul Pfaff big-blocks installed low in the boat and “in line,” meaning with their flywheels facing one another rather than staggered side-by-side. To get the power to the twin Weismann Surface Drives, they used a clever V-shape offset box.

Their goal was balancing—or canceling if you will—the effects of camshaft rotation on handling. The idea was that if the engines were installed facing one another, flywheel to flywheel, the rotation of one camshaft would counteract the rotation of the other camshaft. The boat would not pull to the right or the left as a result of engine torque, because that torque would be balanced.

“You get the automatic benefit of engine counter-rotation,” said Pat Weismann.

The project produced mixed results and the boat was eventually sold by owner Scot Conrad to Dave Kutscher. Kutscher liked the concept of facing engines, but like the Weismann brothers, he was interested in efficiency and saving weight. In essence, he gave Weismann Marine a clean sheet of paper to not just install the engines and set them up with Weismann Surface Drives, but build the engines themselves. So the Weismanns started with the LS7, 427-cubic-inch Corvette platform and marinized a pair of them. As in the original Ettore boat, the engines were installed flywheel to flywheel.

“Nobody had done a marinized LS7 that I had seen, and we were after the best horsepower-to-weight ratio,” Pat Weismann said. “We were playing with efficiencies. We wanted to see how fast the boat would run with a minimal amount of horsepower. We’ve been working on engine packages to go with our drives and gear boxes.”

To that end, the AVR stepped V-bottom was equipped with a pair of Weismann Offset FNR transmissions, Weismann six-speed semiautomatic transmissions and Weismann surface stern drives. With the twin 650-hp, 384-pound engines turning 7,500 rpm, the boat averaged 104 mph during the late-2008 kilo runs on the Salton Sea (see “Track Record,” February 2009, Page 50).

“For a long time everyone thought big horsepower was the way to go,” said Todd Petersen of Racepak Data Systems, who engineered the boat’s electronics. “We wanted to come out and show people that there’s a different way to do it. With lightweight engines, a lower center of gravity, big props spinning more slowly—efficient everything—you can do nine-tenths of what you could do with bigger power.”

For most high-performance offshore and automotive product shops, that sort of project would be more than enough for a year. But there was another Weismann product-equipped boat at the Salton Sea Speedweek, a 23-foot, six-person military vessel with a 315-hp Yanmar diesel engine. With a 44-mph top speed, it certainly wasn’t fast. But it was equipped with the latest product-in-development from Weismann, a twin-propeller counter-rotating surface drive.
power_0309_b.jpg
The last attempt at such a drive was the Mercury Racing Blackhawk, and it failed. Setup was a challenge—no one could seem to dial it in consistently—and reliability was marginal. Mercury ended up pulling the Blackhawk from the market. But the product caught the attention and imagination of the Weismann brothers who believed that, if made reliable, a counter-rotating surface drive could work—and work well.

“The goal was trying to make a counter-rotating drive that was surfacing, because I hadn’t seen one that could take any horsepower,” Pat Weismann said. “The Blackhawk lasted about a year and went away. But it was intriguing, because counter-rotating propellers made a boat go extremely straight and eliminated handling issues—the boat doesn’t want to swap ends.

“The way the drive is designed, our counter-rotating drive has a single input through a universal joint and two sets of gears, clockwise and counterclockwise. It can be run as a single or as a twin. You can flip the rotation of the lead propeller. Because it’s counter-rotating, it kind of cancels all the ideas on inward and outward propeller rotation.”

At press time, the prototype drive, tabbed the WDP (Weismann Duo Prop), had 17 hours and Weismann said his team was “doing everything to try to break it—we only run at wide-open throttle.” To help speed up the process, the drive has giant six-blade propellers, 41"-pitch in the lead and 44"-pitch following. Weismann said development should be complete in six months, and that his goal is for the drive to be rated for engines up to 1,500 hp producing up to 1,600 foot-pounds of torque.

“I hate to put a horsepower number on it, because there’s so much more to it than that such as the weight of the boat, the propellers and so on, and people will always just push it to that number,” he said. “But that’s our goal.

“The project has no budget,” he added. “There’s no end-customer for it right now. It’s just something we wanted to do. It’s not that challenging when you start with a clean sheet of paper.”

At least for a Weismann.

– Matt Trulio is a freelance writer for Powerboat.

[Geronimo36]

I showed the very first Volvo 200 drive on a 16' Donzi at the Jacksonville Boat Show in November 1964. Bill Steele and Joe Swift of Mercury offered me money and Ho's if I would swing by Lake X on the way home. No dice!

Nice!

[Ratickle]

I showed the very first Volvo 200 drive on a 16' Donzi at the Jacksonville Boat Show in November 1964. Bill Steele and Joe Swift of Mercury offered me money and Ho's if I would swing by Lake X on the way home. No dice!

Nice!

Probably were ugly Ho's..........

[MikeyFIN]

Probably were ugly Ho's..........

Knowing Brownies way of thinking and way of life...
I Think he would´ve expressed his opinion about the quality of the ladies of the hour...

[T2x]

I showed the very first Volvo 200 drive on a 16' Donzi at the Jacksonville Boat Show in November 1964. Bill Steele and Joe Swift of Mercury offered me money and Ho's if I would swing by Lake X on the way home. No dice!

You declined Ho's????????

Boy! They must have been ugly!