Beautiful slow motor to Port St Joe

The weather couldn’t be much better today. It’s relatively dry with a great breeze out of the northeast. When we out on the new prop, we discovered that the original prop was a left hand prop. Very unusual for a single engine boat. I of course ordered the new prop as a right hand hand prop. Fortunately, since the zf 68a transmission is a dual direction full duty transmission, all I had to do was switch the control cables. Even more fortunately, since I opted for the electronic controls, all I had to do was swap the control wires. Much easier than swapping and calibrating physical cables. There is a significant footnote to this story. As a transmission takes load in a specific direction for a long period of time, it settles into its gears. Metal gets lightly shaved off until the gears seat properly. Add to this the fact that the gears are being pushed in forward and pulled in reverse. So now that we swapped the pushing force by changing the prop, we noticed that the “new forward” gearing rattled quite a bit underway. We’ve decided to take a moderate approach to re-aclimating the gears by running at very low rpm and gradually bringing the rpm up in 50 increments as the rattle decreases. This is essentially helping the transmission find its new normal. We started at 700 rpm and are now up to 1322 with almost zero noise. After this 7 hour slow run today we will change the gear oil and filter and cut the filter open to inspect it for shavings. After we have fresh oil we will test higher rpm’s to see if we have a new normal. Pretty optimistic that it’s working based on the sound of everything. We obviously haven’t been able to test the full benefits of the new prop but even at low rpm, Eventide seems to be pushing through the water in a more authoritative way. @jacksoncbutler and I also took the time to re align the shaft and the transmission yesterday. Over the past 800 miles looks like we came out of alignment to .007 at the 6 o’clock. We brought it to within .0025, .003 being the gold standard. So, things are looking really good right now.