Upgrade from SD31 to SD50 issues?

[Galumay]

As per my other thread, here

we have suffered severe damage to one of our SD31 sail drives and due to the difficulty in obtaining some of the required parts, the only viable option may be to upgrade to SD50's.

Has anyone done this upgrade and if so how much work is there with regards to the mounting of the SD50s? Would we need to modify engine mounts etc?

The engines are Yanmar 3JH series.

[ozsailer]

Gday Galumay, I may be wrong here but I think you will find that the SD 50 was replaced a long time ago by the new model SD60. When we had our Lagoon 410 we did a full upgrade of motors and saildrives (SD 60s). In the initial batch of SD 60s there was an issue where the saildrives would not go into gear periodically. This turned out to be a design fault that was identified and fixed all under warranty. To my knowledge I have heard nothing other than good things about the SD 60. You will need a conversion plate but that is part of the deal.



Ozsailer

[Galumay]

yes, Ozsailer, i realised after posting that the SD60's would be the upgrade. Fairly straightforward conversion by the looks.

[Galumay]

Turns out the conversion is not straightforward at all! Going from SD31s on 3JH series engines to SD60 is very difficult apparently. Also there are no SD60's available until at least August at the earliest.

According to Minnards there was a conversion plate for SD31 to SD45/50 but there is not one for direct from SD31 to SD60 so its either get one machined or buy a complete engine and saildrive fibreglass mount and cut the old ones out and put the new ones in!

So as per my other thread the hunt for SD31s to cannibalise continues.