My point is though, that if they had presented that design to the staff in Racine Wisconsin, then they would have told management promptly that is was not a workable design and they would all come back. It was not hard to spot that Boondoggle. The Grand Forks dealer worked hard on me to get me to buy one. I told the salesman to let me see the service manual. So I looked at it. I think they sent it to me electronically if I remember correctly.
Anyhow I predicted this disaster and proclaimed the design a disaster. So all those engines came back in a hurry, and I believe the dealer told me that not one they had sold ran for over a hundred hours and most less. So he could not fathom out how I predicted it. I told him I could spot lousy design a mile off. I am certain the good folk in Racine would have refused to build those engines, and I bet management knew it.
Bad management/ownership. Same thing happened at Harley Davidson under AMF. A couple of sayings about Harleys during the bad times- "It's not leaking, it's marking its territory" and "If the part doesn't fit, beat it and if it breaks, you needed a new one, anyway".
The clattering cam gears was caused by using two spur gears, rather than cambering the teeth on one of them and the top end was lubricated by oil fumes, drifting up from the crank case. They later had transmission problems where it would lock up while being driven- riders were being launched over the handlebar. AMF almost sold the company, piecemeal.
However, what makes you think the people assembling OMC or any other engine know if something will fail, or why? Have you ever spoken with someone in those positions? Most aren't highly educated, almost none have any engineering or technical service experience and this is gonna make some people REALLY angry, they were probably union workers- that isn't always a constructive situation, anymore. It's often a very adversarial arrangement between labor and management and you're giving them credit for knowledge they probably didn't have. The tech support people need to be able to support the dealers and handle questions without giving incorrect answers and they collect data, so trends can be identified. The problem with OMC was that scrapping the whole project early would have been ridiculously expensive- somehow, they either ignored problems during development or they decided to let them slide- I never got the impression that the latter would happen, based on many calls to the company for tech support when I serviced boats.
