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Velvet drive

LincolnCraft

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I have a 21 foot lincoln craft with a casale vdrive and a velvet drive. Im looking to get a new motor for it but i was wondering how much horsepower the velvet drive can handle?
 

74 spectra20 v-drive

74 spectra20 v-drive
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Is it a 71C or 72C? You want the 72C, I have a 72C behind 500hp and grew up with one in a Sanger with a Boss 429 motor. I had two iisue with mine I broke the dampner plate once and wore the splines off the output shaft. The splines incident was bad, when they went I was under a lot of load showing someone how good the boat turned the splines let go and I reved the crap out of it and burned up the oil pump. It was my fault, the mounts I had machined off my pattern were off so the splines were not meshed perfectly and over a few years wore out and let loose. Since we fixed that issue and run a Hevy Duty dampner plate it works great. I have space issues in an 18'6 sanger so I like it since it is small. I recently had another one gone through for my Spectra 20 and I was asking Community Transmission in Bellflower about using a turbo 400 or power glide instead of the Velvet drive he told me to come back wen he had the unit pulled apart and he would show why he likes the v-drive, the cluth packs are huge in the Velvet Drive and with only running around 500 hp he suggested to stay with the Velvet drive, anything over 600hp move up to the Turbo 400.
 

wrighton

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Good information. I have a paragon set up in my mini- and had the same question about HP handling. I have not had any issues with 500 + horsepower. But stepping up to 700-800. IIt has F-N-R
 

LincolnCraft

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its a borg warner 72C, the motor i want is a big block chevy with a 8-71 blower and innercooler , about 950hp, would the velvet drive handle that?
 

74 spectra20 v-drive

74 spectra20 v-drive
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its a borg warner 72C, the motor i want is a big block chevy with a 8-71 blower and innercooler , about 950hp, would the velvet drive handle that?

I believe the book quotes 550 hp as max on these, I had talked with a guy out of Oakland and he runs a tug boat business, his old boats run the 72C units and he loves them and swears by them, but again the trans guy that worked on mine was hesitant at anything above 600HP, I believe it is the RPM's that scare him not so much the torque and HP. I can attest that they do not like a lot of RPM's especially quick and frewheeling. When I chewed the splines off my dampner and ultimalely tore up the pump in the velvet drive, my tatle tale on the tack was sitting at 7200, If you are going that big with the engine, you may want to consider the Turbo 400 especially to help you keep your RPM up and speed down at idle, depending on the attitude of you set up the velvet drive may not keep you under 5mph at idle. After seeing the internals of a velvet drive and a power glide side by side I would never use a Power Glide but I think you should go to a T400 with that much HP/Torque
 
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