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Props are every bit as critical to the performance of airboats as airplane propellers are to aircraft. DynaVibe balances both equally well, as the principles of balancing don’t differ from airplanes to airboats. The benefits are also similar: less stress on the engine, the propeller, the mounts, instruments and hull.  Here are two stories of airboat prop balancing with DynaVibe. An owner who had installed a modified 502 V-8 engine in his airboat experienced a problem on the 5-bladed prop he was using. After just 10 hours of use on the prop, the blades cracked, resulting in a catastrophic failure. Because the owner had balanced the prop at installation with DynaVibe, he had the diagnostic data to allow the blade manufacturer to rule out imbalance as the cause of the failure. Instead, the manufacturer determined that there wasn’t sufficient blade surface for the horsepower of the engine: the powerful engine was spinning the blades too fast. The manufacturer provided a new, 6-bladed prop at no charge to this owner. The new prop was also balanced, going from an initial vibration of .65 Inches Per Second (IPS) to .06 IPS on the final run. This owner shared, “It felt really good having the information from the DynaVibe balancing runs to go to the prop manufacturer on a warranty claim, which they quickly honored.” Another airboat owner got help balancing his prop from a DynaVibe GX2 user. This airboat was running a Whirlwind prop on a Chevy engine with a Rotator brand reduction, and it was experiencing a pretty bad vibration in RPM transition at about 1/3 power. This initial balancing run revealed a severe vibration of 2.35 IPS, which after a series of balancing runs was reduced to .13 IPS. The GX2 owner shared, “At the last weight addition, it (the vibration) cleaned up significantly.” The following photo shows the balancing setup for this airboat:  DynaVibe owners can use their existing systems to balance airboats to get better performance and improve reliability. To learn more about using DynaVibe to balance airboats, call us at 405.896.0026 or enter your email address using "Contact Us" near the bottom of this page and a DynaVibe team member will contact you. Visit the online store to shop for DynaVibe. We welcome your questions!
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