Dealer telling me I need a new 150S saildrive

[ohthetrees]

The problem is, I think I agree.

Symptoms: lots of fine metal shavings in the gear oil, plus one pencil eraser sized chunk.

History:
Incident 1: previous owner ran over fishing line, water in drive leg, quickly fixed by non-Volvo mechanic somewhere in South Pacific.

Incident 2: clutches needed replacement, creative local mechanic in New Caledonia did it in water, by partially disassembling upper drive in place. Messed up input shaft oil seal. Began to leak oil. Delivery crew ran drive dry or nearly dry. I’ve been putting 1/4 liter oil in every 10-20 hours, and amazingly, seem to run fine.

What the Volvo dealer says:
“The upper gear shows signs of heavy wear, but nothing broken. More interesting was the lower bearing thrust nut on the shaft. It is threaded and meant to retain the bearings. The nut was complete unthreaded and detached from the thrust bearing body. The bearing itself was fortunately prevented from falling into the gear but bearing itself could not have been doing its job well. “

This all Sounds like a new unit to me. They don’t do rebuilds in house, and of course, I’m in a hurry to get south before the weather changes (heading south from Seattle to Mexico, should have left last week.

They suggest a new unit for $8700 plus shipping plus labor plus tax.

I think they are right, but thought I’d sleep on it, and see if the hive mind has any other suggestions, or sources for remanufactured, or cheaper new ones. Not optimistic, but thought I’d ask.

Boat ownership is fun!!!

[tkeithlu]

Any news on this? I'm sorry that you did not get a response. From my generalist position, all I can say is "Yeah, that's one seriously messed up piece of machinery." Sounds like the dealer at least explored the issue and came to a reasonable conclusion.