Thread:

Loader Question

475 to 500 hp.... spinning an A impellor to 5 grand....That seems a tad low for that HP and an 18ft boat

I bet he will say the second loader picture..... top picture is a standard river racer rock grate

first time i ever went to the track, i had an old tired bbc (maybe 400hp) in the sw, ran river racer (this was, like, 10 years ago). it had a speed grate like the one pictured above. first pass was a blistering 13.40 at 72.5. jack took a look under it, came back with one of his "test" loaders (similar, but very different than the one in the second pic above), said "try this". picked up almost .3, running 76. we tried several other little changes that weekend, ended up sunday at 13.03/77.8 mph. no matter how slow you might be, picking up almost 4 tenths and over 4 mph in just one weeked is pretty good...
during the weekend, someone else told kz "have him try this loader, it works great in a sw". that particular loader looked a lot like the pic above. i didn't want to, kz said yeah, try it, so we did - boat lost 2 tenths and had that anchor drag feeling... it was outta there quik..
at the end of the weekend, jack had to pry that loader away from me, but i had him get me one built to the same specs, and i still run it.
the moral is; there are loaders, and then there are loaders. a boat really needs to be tested with a couple different ones in order to get an idea of what might work best.

Originally Posted by Just Electric

in my experience on trial and era with less than 500 hp the more agressive loaders slowed the boat down but when i put the rock grate sport loader and trimed it cause it was digging a little bit to deep i picked up some mph and the boat tseemed to take set better.but thats my 2 cents and trial and era

Whuchu talkin bout Willis? wtf is era?

Luckie, I would talk to cyclone speed & marine about it.

You got 2 good tips so far.

i have found that it depends on the bottom if the boat is a flat delta it likes the rock grate and most others like the 2nd one

Performance of a loader is dependant on a whole bunch of variables. Your top picture that type was made as a cheep way for boat shops to have a loader in their inventory. Yea it works but you will NEVER see them at the track. The bottom picture is the competition type but there is a lot of different types and each type has different dimentions. When we were first developing the loader we would take maybe ten to the race and test. One deeper one longer one blocked one aimed high one low etc. Practice made perfect. Of course it helped that we had access to the High School metal shop to make them up half dozen at a time. If I was to chooze I would borrow as many from friends as you can, find one that works for you, then have someone like Greg replicate it for you.