176 Rudder Story - again

KENO wrote: Then I figure for the next test I can sit on the platform steering with a paddle while Pete drives

DVskier wrote: I skied behind a 176 in Winter Haven in 97 that had a got 40 engine, what a beast! It had the strongest hole shot I ever experienced. .

Ken,
There's a very tempting scenario here.

Gary S wrote: You know Larry if Ken had one he'd get one of each rudder and switch them out and give us full test results. You know what you have to do....... Next step is a GT40 swap

We'll just test rudders on your boat Larry

I've come up with a test plan, I'm gonna bounce it off Pete for a sanity check though

Maybe he'll come along and help me out with the testing

I think that to establish a good baseline the initial testing should be done with no rudder installed.............don't worry though, we'll put some kind of plug in the rudder port so it won't sink.

Then I figure for the next test I can sit on the platform steering with a paddle while Pete drives

Then assuming we're still in one piece, we'll just randomly pick from the 3 rudders to continue the testing.

You should come along too Gary to record all of this for posterity

And he'd have it done by tonight.

I mentioned on the splash thread, I might revisit the 176 rudder story in a new thread, so here goes.

I had heard, as many had, of the legend of the crappy 176 stainless rudder being there because CC wanted to detune the boat so it wouldnt perform as well as the 196.

Since I now had one, I decided to try to unravel the story a bit more. Still seem to be a few gaps in the story, but this is what I gathered.

Jody seemed to have the best answers, which he shared on mulitple sites, this one is from BOS.



I asked Jody if the boat was originally produced with an 11A but I never got an answer back. Maybe as the test prototype, maybe into production, who knows.

Then as the story unfolded, ends up there were 2 rudders on the 176 once it went into production.

The Bronze one:





and the stainless one.



No one seemed to know which of those came first.

This post suggests that the bronze one came first, then replaced by the stainless one, not because the bronze one was great, but because it was bad at low speeds, reverse? maybe turning too? I dont know.



I believe Zach told me he has driven one with the bronze rudder and that it was bad, and mine, with the stainless, was much better.

In my research, I stumbled on this old post from Craig Warner at NECC.



His post suggests the stainless was to detune the "brass" one. Which brass one? The small one pictured above or an 11A, tho I have never seen anything that suggests a boat left the factory with an 11A. So Craig's story about detuning conflicts with the post above about improving from the small bronze to the stainless.

A couple months ago, I called NECC to talk to Craig about it to see what his recollections were. Unfortunately, he was tied up at the time but the guy who answered the phone had been around forever and remembered some of the story. He said nothing was ever swapped to detune the 176. That CC wants all their boat to perform optimally, why would they degrade performance, and that the 176 was not in competition with the 196, they were two different boats, two different markets. He said the swaps they did at NECC were to replace the crappy bronze one with the better (performing) stainless one.

So there you have it. Still clear as mud.

Here are a couple other comparison photos I dug up.





So I am generally content with the stainless one. Turns as well as I need at the ends of the course and to my very amateur/novice standards tracks well enough through the course, tho admittedly I am neither a certified driver, nor a 41 off/36 mph skier.

If I get really bored some winter, I may rip the back end out of the boat and install the 11A, but until then, Im good.