Recently I had to scrap our boat Tuscan, we had owned for 21 years. She was 36 years young.
My wife and I got caught in three to four foot swells out on Leech Lake. After that she was taking on a little water, so I pulled her for close inspection.
The hull especially the transom was no longer seaworthy.
So I found a very well cared for 1997 SeaRay 175 series five at Outing Minnesota on Lake Roosevelt. It was powered by a 125 Mercury, that was standard equipment on these.
This engine was an absolute piece of junk. That is why the boat was in such good shape.
I trialled the boat on Roosevelt Lake, and the engine performed in the ridiculous fashion that all these engines do, if they work at all.
These engines run at idle and below 2200 RPM on two cylinders and switch over in this rev range to four cylinder, giving you a mighty jolt as the lower two cylinders cut in.
The engine has no cylinder head and the block and and head are one piece! This makes service of a ring job, for instance, next to impossible.
Now these engines are two stroke. So the lower cylinders while not firing can not be decompressed. Also they have to receive so little fuel in that mode, that there is barely any lubrication. Remember the engine is two cycle and lubricates from the oil in the gas. So the engines are very prone to cold seizing.
The engines are a hard start with a very rough idle due to two pistons fighting compression. At the range where it does not know if it wants to be on two or four cylinders it just about shook the boat apart.
The reason for this nonsense was the lousy MBAs and marketers. The tale was to have an engine that was high power and a kicker engine all in one. Trouble is if you use it as a kicker engine you blow it up!
Anyhow I just wanted the hull and transferred the my Yamaha F150 to the SeaRay.
I sold the miserable Mercury for $1500 in under 24 hours on Craigslist. I did not have the heart to sell it to the first caller, who had one of these dogs on his Pontoon boat. The engine had been nothing but trouble and finally had broken a piston. I could not resist asking him why he wanted to go through this again. Anyhow I had people chasing this engine from far and wide, even from Canada. I returned all calls and Emails. It seems there a many boats in need of repowering due lousy design and penny pinching MBAs. Don't think this sort of thing is not a core reason for the economic mess we are in. There is a connection.
So I did the transfer work with the two staff at Bob's boat, Josh and Tom, at Laporte MN, just down the road.
We added a 12 gallon fuel tank, added gauges and installed the marine band radio and GPS.
I was proud of the GPS installation and converted one of the cup holders as the base.
Anyhow the conversion took two and a half days and went very well. The boat achieves a speed of 52 mph at 5600 rpm.
Here she is on my lift.
The new instrument cluster.
In a pleasant harbor on Horseshoe Bay Leech Lake.
We now get to the real meat of the story.
While changing the engine over another boat with a Yamaha 150 four cycle came in of the same vintage as mine. It was exhibiting strange and ominous symptoms. I really had no idea what was at the bottom of it. I should have gone to the NET.
The boat was dispatched to the local Yamaha dealer and chalked up a bill of $1700.
It turns out that these engines from 2004 to 2006 had plastic gears driving the two harmonic balancer shafts without an oil spray. The gears shred and cause severe engine damage including total loss of oil pressure. The local dealer has replaced two engine blocks for this problem as well as replaced numerous balancer units.
This problem is all over the NET.
This post is particularly revealing.
To make matters worse the first tech bulletin about the installation of the redesigned balancer unit, which has metal gears and an oil spray tower, had wrong information for timing the balancers causing more damage.
Yamaha have refused to recall these engines, which is not only unethical, but immoral. These engines take boats out far from land. An engine failure in a boat in rough sees is close to as dangerous as an aircraft engine.
I can tell you Yamaha are really getting an earful from me.
The next issue is that the local dealer is a price gouger. He wants $791 for the updated balancer unit. The MRSP is $320 and I can purchase it from Sim Yamaha for $255.96!
So I will continue to blast Yamaha and before venturing out far from land I will purchase a unit from Sim Yamaha and instal it myself if Yamaha won't do the honorable thing.
What makes this all the more disgraceful is that there is an oil passage in the block, but not the original unit. The revised unit has a passage that lines up with this passage for the spray tower.
This tells me that the MBA types insisted on plastic gears to cut corners against the advice of engineers. The engineers left an oil way knowing full well a bad problem had been created. This made retrofit possible.
Now this motor was not cheap and the top of its class in price. These units run into trouble usually between 150 and 200 hours. This is the range of the hours on my engine.
Unfortunately this is just another example among many of severe corporate malfeasance.
