hydro shield?

[Bushwacker]

Originally Posted by badhabit

. . . on a tuna run we will put about 300lbs of ice in the cuddy which makes it slice the seas even better but it still wants to lay over at the slightest turn. if you wanted to would you be able to use auto pilot on nice days? we don't have one but I could not see it working on this boat. I know you guys say this is a drivers boat and I do know what that means. I have had boats you have had to work at in rough seas but you have to do that with this one in calm seas.

As Terry E. mentioned, Connor has his 25 dialed in very well with the original I/O configuration and it seems to handle pretty well. You might try using Capt. Terry's CG calculation method to calculate how much the lateral CG has been shifted by the change from I/O to OB configuration. You could then use the same procedure to calculate how much ballast you'd have to add up in the bow to get the CG back to it's design location. You could also use that process to figure out CG location with the 300 lbs of ice in the cuddy and see how that compares to the design CG location.

Carl Moesly designed this boat to have a ballast tank up in the bow using a rubber bladder tank (so it could be filled and emptied quickly w/o needing a vent hose), similar to what he used in his race boats, but he sold the company to Potter before he ever built one, and Potter evidently didn't understand the ballast tank, so left it out. So maybe a rubber bladder ballast tank up in the bow would help the handling.

I wonder if your problem is related to the vertical CG location. As Terry E. mentioned, that lump of Chevy iron down low in the bilge in the original design probably makes the boat more stable in roll than it would be with an outboard powerhead mounted up at 25-30" above the keel. If a marinized SB Chevy weighs ~900 lbs with manifolds & risers, at about 5.9 lbs/gal for gasoline, you'd need something like a 150 gallon gas tank down where the engine was to match the original configuration!