Reply To: QSB6.7 trolling

[Justin Riege]

When you think about it, all the trolling valve does is allow a bit of controlled slippage. When shifting in and out of gear, basically your are transitioning from fully open very low friction, through a range of slippage as the inertia of the shaft, prop, and output side of the gear is overcome and accelerated to synchronicity, to fully engaged over a short span of time. Maybe about a second? Shifting in and out of gear is what a boat gear is designed to do. I think about when we wakeboard or ski on my ski boat, borg-warner velvet drive. Picking up a skier, bring them the rope, slack up, reverse for a sec while they adjust, slack up hit it, do it all over. I could shift in and out of gear 200 times for a hour or two of skiing. Never gave it a second thought. Is it theoretically more wear on the gear with every shift, sure, but my guess is you choose to go to the trolling valve more for comfort, consistency, enjoy-ability than fear of excessive wear.

A lot of high HP boats have to shift in and out to stay withing no wake speed. We did it on a sea trial with Tony just the other day.

I’d like to hear if anyone has seen these transmissions wear out from excessive shifting. Rob??

My guess is you will get a lot of qualitative advice, like “well as long as it isn’t excessive it will be okay” but it might be hard to find anything quantitative… No one is going to say keep it under “68.2 shifts per hour and you are good.” So the question is what is excessive?