My trip to Beta factory

[Oceanride007]

Today I visited the Beta assembly plant in Cheshire England, My near 30 YO 50HP diesel (BMW D50) will need to be replaced soon enough, and as I am visiting UK, thought I'd make a appointment and dropped in, met Andrew one of the principles and had a few questions.
firstly I have concerns about common rail/electronic injection, he said they only do it with their Generator sets, not propulsion engines. They consider electronic injection unsafe for small boat propulsion sticking to traditional mechanical injection, they do however use nmea 2000 for instrumentation.
At the factory they had engines from 10hp to (think) 135hp, he says they are all compliant with EU emmision regs , asked him about does that mean these engines have had the fuel injection delayed to avoid Nitrus oxide emmision, dodged that one by saying they don't mess with settings determined by the manufacturer, by the way all engines are tested by the Engine supplier (Kubota think mostly) and they are tested again by Beta before they leave the factory. Think Beta only adds the gearbox, alternators, starters, coolers, flywheels couplings and resilient mounts.
Later was shown a hyper drive think he called it, with 2 of 48V DC motors with a big alternator on the front says they could motor 20% and electric drive 80% I presume this is for a canal boat, I asked about a alternator suitable for LFP battery he said one word ''Mastervolt'' showed me one engine that had 3 alternators, extra one is for a 3 phase alternator that gets rectified to 3 Phase 50Hz in a black box.
Time was short but was impressed by the place.

[Compass790]

Thanks for posting. Didn't know they delayed injection to reduce NOX.
I'm wary of EFI too as I don't know how to fix @ sea.
So are you sold on Beta?

[mcarthur]

We visited too a few months ago. Very accommodating and helpful.
We were after information on the hybrid option in particular, either separately or off their 150hp. Unfortunately they farm that out to hybrid marine on Wight so we didn't get the chance to see one.
Very impressive place.
Agree that Beta seems to do all marinizing on the bare Kubota engine block.