By Matt Trulio

Thanks to a pair of Arneson drives handling a combined 3,600 horsepower from four engines, a well-known Skater catamaran is back on the water.

The construction quality, durability and resale value of Skater catamarans is such that each model usually has more than one life. (As for the number of lives for cats of the feline variety: Who cares?) This is especially true of the larger Skater cats, which begin their lives as one boat and, thanks to new power and paint, often show up years later as another.

Recycler, a 46-foot Skater owned by Don Onken of Easton, Ill., is a perfect case in point. The cat started out as a four-engine race boat called 'Nuff Respect, which later became Bob Morgan's Big Thunder Marine racer that campaigned on the Super Boat International circuit. Morgan hung up his helmet a few years back, pulled the engines and drives from the catamaran and sold them. By the time Onken, 67, decided to buy the 46-footer a couple of years ago, he was looking at a bare hull.

Onken figured it would be a whole lot easier—and cheaper—to repower the Skater with a pair of supercharged monster engines than restore the catamaran to its four-engine glory. But Onken, who runs a recycling business and is a tinkerer/inventor by nature, didn't choose the easy path. He wanted four naturally aspirated engines to power his new toy.

"We like the challenge of doing things like this," he said.

What Onken didn't want, however, were the rigging complications of getting four engines dialed into two conventional stern drives. He'd been happy with the Arneson straight-shaft surface drives on his 38-foot-long Bertram race boat, and he wanted to go with a pair of those drives on the catamaran.

For engines, Onken opted for four 572-cubic-inch, electronically fuel-injected big-blocks from Keith Eickert Performance Products. Each naturally aspirated engine produces 900 horsepower, which dictated the choice of Arneson ASD 10 units for the project.

Each ASD 10 drive had a "chain box" that is mounted on the catamaran's transom. The driveshafts from the front engines enter the lower section of the box and connect with the shafts for the drive themselves. The driveshafts from the rear engines enter the top of the chain box, where a chain transfers the power to the lower shaft at a 1:1 ratio. Among the many tricky aspects of the rigging was the placement of the rear engines, which had to be high for the driveshafts—supported by carrier bearings—from the front engines to run underneath them.

In the process, Onken and his crew created a lot more working space in what had been an extremely cramped engine compartment. "Before, you could barely get in there to work on the engines," Onken said.

In addition to repowering the Recycler catamaran, the crew repainted it. They transformed what had been a two-person racing cockpit into a four-seat pleasure cockpit. To further enhance the boat for pleasure use, they hinged the back section of the F-16 canopy so it can be run in "sunroof" mode.

After taking two years to complete the project, Onken debuted Recycler at the 2007 Lake Rescue Shootout on Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri (Onken has a second home there), and the cat attracted plenty of onlookers. Most observers had never seen a four-engine catamaran, let alone the third and most sophisticated generation of one.

To date, Recycler has reached 140 mph. Onken expects the catamaran to top 160 mph. But it won't come cheap—with all four engines running hard, the boat gets about a third of a mile per gallon.

Of course, that won't stop Onken. His next project is restoring a classic Cougar V-bottom. Naturally, he'll be going with four engines and two Arneson drives. P

Contact Information

Keith Eickert Performance Products,
11 Industry Drive
Palm Coast, FL 32137
386-446-0660, www.keitheickert.com

Arneson Industries
47 Mill St.
San Rafael, CA 94901, 415-485-0788, www.arneson-industries.com