I looked at a 99 renegade 20 over the weekend with a 225 Johnson. Good looking boat for the age. I’m not very experienced with boat setup but I worked as a mechanic for many years in my youth. Just sold a 1997 17’ nitro to get into a better platform: more space for me and the kids, increased stability, better suited for shallow water anchors, and so on.
With that being said my goal wasn’t a 70+ mph boat but I read up on the boats here before looking at it and learned that this boat should be able to hit 70 pretty easily. I was quickly disappointed by how terrible the hole shot and top speed was. About 20 seconds to get on plane and a gps top speed of only 46 mph at around 4600 rpm trimmed all the way up. It has a jack plate and it looked like it had a lot of room to go up. I explained my concerns to the seller and he dropped the price a good bit so I took the gamble with it. My hope was that the boat has never been setup properly and I could make several small tweaks to the setup and make some big improvements without a lot of investment.
Here’s where I’m at:
Measured ptp as best as I could to be 4”. I was hoping it would be lower than that to explain the poor performance. I brought the motor up an inch knowing that I needed a lot of improvement.
The owner told me the prop had been reworked by someone recently after he hit it on something. It says raker on it but there aren’t any other letters or numbers that I can see. I’m going to try to measure the pitch soon and see if it’s appropriate. He told me it was setup as “medium” on speed and holeshot. The foot was replaced with a rebuilt foot at the same time. He claimed the boat’s performance was the same before as it was after the work was done. He also said the compression was checked and it checked out ok.
It has a foot throttle but not a hot foot brand unit. I wondered if perhaps the cables weren’t adjusted properly or had stretched over the years not allowing it to reach WOT. With the cowl off I noticed it appeared the throttle wasn’t opening completely. I adjusted the throttle cable to take up about half the distance it was short on the stop. So maybe 3/8” of the 3/4” gap.
I’m working on getting out on the water soon to see if these minor changes had an effect on performance. My gut tells me there’s something bigger I’m missing. Most people that come on here are looking for an extra 5-10mph where as I’m 25mph below where I should be. I would really appreciate any tips or advice anyone can share.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by scfishin
