Here's a before and after pic. I had a jetovator and had it locked into a fixed trim angle. Now I have the new PD and I left off the rudder. Things are good. I have mild wood. Assometer says I have picked up a leetle bit of mph. I can set a little down trim and get a sweet hole shot and small roost for pulling skiers. I can trim at max up and get a cougar attracting rooster. So life is good...


But I have almost zero reverse thrust now. There's only one of me in the boat so I can't verify that the bucket is all the way down but it sure as hell is when I test in my garage. All I get is a crappy little reverse thrust and A LOT of water splashing into the back of my boat. I also have no neutral now. Used to have just a tiny bit of forward when I was in neutral. Now I have a lot (sez the new dent in the back door of my tow rig.)

With the before gear, I had really nice control of the boat. Slide in and out of reverse at idle and the boat would respond. Now I just have forward, forward.

Help!!! Thanks.

push the nozzle down for a better reverse

i would have to agree with 2sav, where is the diverter set when you are trying to use reverse, if you have the nozzle pointing up (like throwing a rooster) you will get shitty reverse as stated above, try to make sure if anything you are pointing down a bit

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried reverse with the nozz at full down, 1 notch down, level, no diff. Still crappy compared with before gear. (Before was fixed at level with no trim angle whatsoever.) And yeah it would make no sense to try reverse with full roost. But that was the only position I didn't try.

Called PD and chatted. Tim says some people notice less thrust than jetovator rig but very few talk about near total loss of reverse. Especially with only an 18' hull to move around. So I suspect its me and something.

Back in the garage.... When the control lever is just barely in reverse the bucket is fully closed and there's just a bit of play when I grab it and wiggle. All the play is up in the control area I can hear it. But even though I wish it was tighter it isn't enough to push the bucket up off covering the nozzle.

I did notice that both control cables were sliding a bit in the transom bushings so I tightened them a bit more and then decided to just overkill it so I clamped the bastards inside the transom with an additional clamp.

Then I dicked with the trim setting. I moved everything so #5 is now straight (I mean in line with bowl) instead of #4. Now #8 is full down and #3/#2 is full up. I'm going back out when the weather is OK and assume that I just need to remember to go into full or almost full down whenever I want to reverse. Darn another thing to remember when I get near the dock. Fly zipped, beer stowed, limbs inside boat and ... oh yeah trim down boy, down!

So far I have to say my reverse performance is worse and I am going to have to either retrain myself on how to drive when at low speed or, discover what obvious thing is that I've not adjusted. Tim at Place seemed to me to be saying that the PD product is "weaker."

What I mean by performance is I want to be able to toggle back and forth between fwd, neut and reverse while at idle and be able to crabwalk my boat up to the edge of the dock. I could do this with ease before the PD.

Now what I have is no neut - it is a strong forward and a feeble reverse. I'm hoping I can get some more neutral by taking every last bit of adjustment out of the control and dropping the bucket even more down over the pipe. But that won't change the feeble reverse. That's a done deal and I miss the old way.

BUT dang the easy trim adjustment and rooster are fun!

Isn't neutral just a division of flow between forward and reverse?   You never stop the flow so
wouldn't that mean your gate is out of adjustment if your boat won't sit still?

If it isn't down far enough in neutral to stop the boat from going forward then maybe it's just approaching neutral when you put it in reverse.

I had the button out one day and had neutral full time while reving up the engine.  It would JUST
go backwards and that's about it.

Sounds like what you have.   

But you say the gate is fully closed when it's barely in reverse???   What happens in FULL reverse? 
Any thing different?  Did you check to see if it pulls the gate back up?



   

I just wanted to let you know I took my boat out yesterday.  It was the first trip with the new place diverter.
Reverse was fine.

Installed a new(er) Morse control lever assy and now I take back everything I said about the Place Diverter reverse quality. 

All is good!