[spareparts]

that Alpha one should be fine aas long as your not trying to pull up a bunch of slalom skiers. Mercury used the Alpha 1 gen 1 behind some 330 hp 454's in 85-87 with limited success( used 1:32 gears). The main difference( strength wise) between the Alpha 1 and Alpha 1 Gen II is the absense of the o-ring groove on the verticle drive shaft. Lots of gen 1's would break off at the groove under high load or contact. You can update your gearset with the HD 1:50 to 1 gears( stronger than the 1:32's), but by the time you pay someone to install them and pay for the parts, you could buy a complete new drive from sterndrive.com. I haven't used any of their drives, but the people I know that have used them haven't had any problems. The best thing to do in your case would be to run the Mercury High Performance gear lube( the green stuff), add a gear lube monitor( they make an external kit), and posibly install a drive shower to keep the upper unit cool. If taken care of, that alpha will be OK, I built an Alpha 1 SS for a 21 Sleekcraft, that had a blown bigblock in it, I personally drove it to 101 on radar. The guy took it easy on the drive, he'd never hit it untill he was running at least 65, and once a year I'd tear down the upper( he had the 1:32 to 1 gear set) and check the clearances in the drive and reshim if needed. When he sold the boat it was still running the original gearset.

By the way, use good grease on teh input splines, and keep a check on the alignment, pull the drive at least once a year( or 50 hours) and put more grease on the splines, and check the alignment. With heavy boats I've seen a lot of coupler failures from lack of lube, the strain of the heavy boat tends to work the grease out of the splines