Theresamarie11
New Member
Thanks to all who previously commented and helped me make a choice on which 260DA to buy. So, with a huge amount of excitement we took the 2000 7.4L 260 DA out on lake champlain with the broker today. The survey is next week. We have a deposit on it but it's not quite ours yet, and is dependent on the results of this test and survey.
So here is what we found.
Everything seems to work but the windshield wipers. So we're having this checked out.
The bennet 'auto tab' is very cool as is the bow thruster. While it doesn't seem that it's going to be normally difficult to dock, I'm sure the thruster will come in handy at times, espcially if we get one of the slips that seems very tight to back into.
Motor sounds good and runs smooth when up to speed. Oil is almost clear it's so clean. Motor has 200 hours. It seems to get up on plane pretty quickly at WOT but we only had 600 lbs of passengers and 1/2 tank of fuel. We were also getting between 2 and 2.4 MPG depending on speed and trim. It was doing around 34 MPH at 16G/hr and 26 MPH at 10.9 G/Hour. The standard horizon GPS also has a fuel flow gauge.
I was also pretty amazed that we could run down to 14mph, on plane, and not have the speed rise/fall like our current boat. Our current boat goes 14mph, or 20mph, and in between is no mans land.. in this place you have to constantly adjust the throttle up/down to maintain speed as the boat either wants to speed up, or slow down.
A few things that bothered us, and if anyone can comment or shed some light on them, we'd appreciate it greatly.
1) The boat shudders a bit when accelerating. Not sure how normal this is or if it's a symptom of other drive train issues. My hubby could feel it if either he or I was driving. I noticed it mostly when I was driving.
2) The top end we could hit, with a good chop (<1ft) was only 38.6 on the GPS when the owner said he could hit 45mph. We could also only get it to a hair under 4000 RPM unless we over-trimmed and then RPM would go up but speed went down.
The prop is a 24 pitch bravo 3 prop, so not sure if this is good or not. I expected it would do better and am a bit dissapointed on this point. We're making sure the motor is gone over well. Is there anything that would cause lower performance? my experience with props on my current boat is that top end performance generally doesn't change much, just acceleration (i.e. larger pitch props are more sluggish from a stop and don't get highest WOT RMPs while smaller pitch hits high range in WOT RPM, gets out of hole faster, but doesn't really get any faster top end).
Any thoughts on these points guys, gals?
Thanks much,
Terri
So here is what we found.
Everything seems to work but the windshield wipers. So we're having this checked out.
The bennet 'auto tab' is very cool as is the bow thruster. While it doesn't seem that it's going to be normally difficult to dock, I'm sure the thruster will come in handy at times, espcially if we get one of the slips that seems very tight to back into.
Motor sounds good and runs smooth when up to speed. Oil is almost clear it's so clean. Motor has 200 hours. It seems to get up on plane pretty quickly at WOT but we only had 600 lbs of passengers and 1/2 tank of fuel. We were also getting between 2 and 2.4 MPG depending on speed and trim. It was doing around 34 MPH at 16G/hr and 26 MPH at 10.9 G/Hour. The standard horizon GPS also has a fuel flow gauge.
I was also pretty amazed that we could run down to 14mph, on plane, and not have the speed rise/fall like our current boat. Our current boat goes 14mph, or 20mph, and in between is no mans land.. in this place you have to constantly adjust the throttle up/down to maintain speed as the boat either wants to speed up, or slow down.
A few things that bothered us, and if anyone can comment or shed some light on them, we'd appreciate it greatly.
1) The boat shudders a bit when accelerating. Not sure how normal this is or if it's a symptom of other drive train issues. My hubby could feel it if either he or I was driving. I noticed it mostly when I was driving.
2) The top end we could hit, with a good chop (<1ft) was only 38.6 on the GPS when the owner said he could hit 45mph. We could also only get it to a hair under 4000 RPM unless we over-trimmed and then RPM would go up but speed went down.
The prop is a 24 pitch bravo 3 prop, so not sure if this is good or not. I expected it would do better and am a bit dissapointed on this point. We're making sure the motor is gone over well. Is there anything that would cause lower performance? my experience with props on my current boat is that top end performance generally doesn't change much, just acceleration (i.e. larger pitch props are more sluggish from a stop and don't get highest WOT RMPs while smaller pitch hits high range in WOT RPM, gets out of hole faster, but doesn't really get any faster top end).
Any thoughts on these points guys, gals?
Thanks much,
Terri
