Are modern sail-drives less reliable? SD50 SD60

[Andando]

Yes,you are probably right.i think I will be going for the SD60 rather than spending money on overhauling my SD 50 - I hope after all these years the problems have been resolved now.

[Houston450]

I realize this is an old post, but does someone have a copy of the Yanmar bulletin mentioned here or a newer one? I believe I have a similar issue starting on my Lagoon with SD60s, 2015, 1800 hours.

[Ostinato]

Originally Posted by Houston450

I realize this is an old post, but does someone have a copy of the Yanmar bulletin mentioned here or a newer one? I believe I have a similar issue starting on my Lagoon with SD60s, 2015, 1800 hours.

Why is the Yanmar bulletin relevant and what issue are you having?

[Captain Bill]

Originally Posted by Houston450

I realize this is an old post, but does someone have a copy of the Yanmar bulletin mentioned here or a newer one? I believe I have a similar issue starting on my Lagoon with SD60s, 2015, 1800 hours.

I don't have the bulletin but If I understand correctly my replacement upper units came from Mastry Engine Center in Tampa Fl. I may be wrong but my understanding was that they were rebuilding the cores that were being replaced under warranty. My drives were literally one month out of warranty when they failed in 2017. Yanmar honored the warranty anyway. I did have 1200 hrs on my units when they replaced them. There was an initial hesitation on their part since the problem normally occurs in the first fifty hours or less. They attributed the fact that I got 1200 hrs on them to the fact that I had left hand props. Apparently the problem only exists on the forward gear and Yanmar defines forward as right handed. I had spent most of that 1200 hours running in reverse gear as far as Yanmar was concerned. My problem was in reverse by my definition. I had probably put less than 20 hours on the "forward" gear as they define it. I have no idea if they will honor the warranty on 2015 drives in 2021, but I think Mastry would probably know about the problem and what it would take to fix it. The ZF tech that I mentioned in my previous post told me that ZF had chosen to do the repair in the field, while Yanmar had chosen to do the repair in a more controlled environment of a machine shop and swap out upper halves of the sail drives in exchange for rebuildable cores. You might want to contact Mastry and find out what the current status of the program is. Yanmar might have assumed that by 2021 all the units that were going to have problems had been identified and repaired and shut down the program. Good Luck