Re: Trailering a Yamaha 115 HP question power tilt up or not???
I vote against transom "savers" for several reasons. First off, most boats and engines will take a hell of a lot harder beating running through decent sized chop or other boats wakes than they will going down the road on a trailer. Also, when an outboard is tilted up it's darned near balanced so there's not going to be a lot of force on the tilt/trailer lock. And my biggest gripe about transom "savers" was discussed in that linked article:
"The most prevalent argument against them centers on the fact that a transom saver transfers the weight and energy from an area that is designed to handle it (the transom) to an area that is not (the trailer). Additionally, while the boat and motor move together, the boat and trailer move independently from each other, causing road vibrations to be transferred back to the outdrive where they can potentially cause even more damage."
Expanding on that paragraph a bit, because of the fact that the boat and trailer "wiggle" independently of each other, it's not just "vibrations" that are transferred to the outboard (and transom) through a transom "saver", but also forces imparted on it from the weight of the rear part of the boat bouncing up and down ever so slightly. IMO those forces are going to be a lot greater than those imparted by the engine itself if the transom "saver" weren't used.
If a fellow engineer has ever looked at this in depth or measured the forces involved using load cells I'd be interested to hear about it. Until then I'm going with my best estimate and saying in my opinion I wouldn't use one.