My Engine Saga

[cww]

Tale of "watch who you let in your engine room". I wrote a little about this in another thread. It's basically impossible to get the marina to do engine service work these days. There is a labor shortage and as soon as they train somebody and send them to school to be a certified tech with cat, detroit, etc., they bail for a higher paying job elsewhere. My marina has no inboard engine tech at all right now, their one guy retired and the other one they were training to take over from him let them pay for all the schooling and then took another job. They tell you upfront now we can't do anything, they have a list of a couple guys they give you who are all booked up for months. So I asked for a recommendation on the detroit diesel facebook forum, and they told me Sean Silverman. I wanted the engines serviced.

This guy comes at bizarre hours, shows up at like 8pm and works until 5 am, then says he has to leave to be at other jobs. Told me I needed new injectors. I said sure. Puts new injectors in, the engines are down on power and smoking. I spent like 6 months trying to get him back to fix it. He came back one more time and it wasn't any better. During that trip, he broke a racor filter housing, put the engine access panels on the wrong sides and then just kept going when they didn't line up, stripping the screws so I had to use a grinding wheel to get them off, which messed up the wallpaper, so I had to get new wallpaper, knocked an engine room door latch off the wall and lost it, and broke some other little stuff I had to fix. I paid him $8900 for that. In the meantime I'm using the boat but going slow, thinking it'll be ok. I asked mechanic #1 whether it was alright to run the boat until he came back and he said yes.

It wasn't. After no-showing on me and ghosting my text messages, then popping back up weeks later saying he lost his phone, I finally fired him and the broker who is selling my old boat recommended mechanic #2, Florida Yacht Services. They're good, just busy like everybody with multi-week or months of lead time. They said the timing was so far off that it was pre-igniting in some cylinders and others weren't firing which washed down the liners. Long story short the rings are trashed. They took pictures through the inspection ports, the oil control rings are garbage. There's a line in the flat outside edge on those that indicates wear, and it is gone on several cylinders. These were 1800 hour engines. Mechanic #1 also broke the governor on starboard. It was $7800 with mechanic #2 to fix what the first guy messed up. Afterwards, they ran better but they still smoked and I had cylinders that the exhaust were 100+ degrees lower than the cylinder next to it.

So I called the company who did the rebuilds on the 8v53's in my last boat, they do a lot of trucks. They don't do maintenance just large jobs, or I would have called them to begin with. These guys are good, they did inframes on my last boat and both engines were done in a month. 1 week per engine plus a couple weeks to get the heads back from the machine shop. So mechanic #3 drives up here from Miami and confirms what #2 told me.

Now the boat is all torn up and both engines are being rebuilt. I don't have a choice, it looks like a mosquito truck just went by the marina when I start them up. Everybody gives me dirty looks. One the smoke clears about 75% when it warms up, the other doesn't clear and smokes all the time. Like all detroits the boat will still run 18 + knots even with everything in the world wrong with the engines, but I'm not someone who will just run them that way. They didn't smoke at all when I got them 100 hours ago.

Couple things for anybody wondering. The cost of an inframe on an 8v71ti with people I know that they know what they're doing is $23k a side parts & labor, so $46k total. The cylinder kits are backordered from Detroit Diesel, there was a nationwide recall due to defective casting on rings and they haven't caught up with order demand yet. So I went with interstate mcbee, which this guy says is better than what comes OEM from detroit lately. The breakdown was $2500 for the cylinder and seal kits from interstate, $2800 for the machine shop to fluoroscope and recondition both heads, new valves, seats, springs, etc. $1k for new injectors, $131.48 for 2 new thermostats, $650 to rebuild the blower, the cost of parts for rebuilding the turbos depends on how out of tolerance the housings are, so don't know that yet, and the rest is labor. That's per engine, so X2 for all of that. Total nightmare.

The silver lining, not that there really is one, is that being detroits it's "only" a $46k problem. At least I feel lucky that I don't have CAT's or Cummins or it would be a $100k+ problem. I had been saving up for stabilizers, that idea is kaput now. Being that it's what I do for a living I sued mechanic #1 this morning. For those of you not familiar with the justice system, it will produce a nice pretty piece of paper saying that he owes me money, but that doesn't mean I will ever see any of it.

Welcome to boating.

[JuiceClark]

Tale of "watch who you let in your engine room". I wrote a little about this in another thread. It's basically impossible to get the marina to do engine service work these days. There is a labor shortage and as soon as they train somebody and send them to school to be a certified tech with cat, detroit, etc., they bail for a higher paying job elsewhere.

The silver lining, not that there really is one, is that being detroits it's "only" a $46k problem. At least I feel lucky that I don't have CAT's or Cummins or it would be a $100k+ problem. I had been saving up for stabilizers, that idea is kaput now. Being that it's what I do for a living I sued mechanic #1 this morning. For those of you not familiar with the justice system, it will produce a nice pretty piece of paper saying that he owes me money, but that doesn't mean I will ever see any of it.

Welcome to boating.

Terrifying. It's like a horror movie when the crazy gets let into the house and then starts hacking-away.

My former biz partner was so good with Detroits from decades on commercial boats and with Viking. He took a pair of sunk 8v92 750s and rebuilt them for a friend of mine for $12k, total! That friend put thousands of hours on the next few years without a problem...running them hard.
Well, me and the biz partner parted with gears grinding during the 2010 recession. I sure wish I could call his ornery ass up today.

[Captain Ralph]

In all my years in Jax, Never heard that name of your problem guy.
That name does pop up in Richmond Hill. Same guy?

[cww]

In all my years in Jax, Never heard that name of your problem guy. That name does pop up in Richmond Hill. Same guy?

That’s him. He’s over the line in Georgia but travels to florida to do work often. He’s awful, I wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy.

[SeaEric]

On FB I've heard both praise and warnings about him. Odd behavior to be sure. Probably judgement proof.

[Pascal]

Horror stories like this is why I decided to repower instead of rebuilding.

[madhatter1]

What a horrible experience. Feel bad for CWW.

[Boatsb]

Real vendors and service providers have insurance. Hire a fly by night and get burned.

I'm quoting 5 to 7 weeks to new projects and will probably be a it behind most of the time awaiting parts.

[Bob Bradley]

Good lord. Sorry for your headaches. We don't live forever - lost time on the water is something you can't get back.

I appreciate you writing this up, but for selfish reasons. I'm printing it out to hand to my wife the next time she complains about my greasy fingernails or the fact that she can't park her car in the garage again tonight.

[rsmith]

That’s him. He’s over the line in Georgia but travels to florida to do work often. He’s awful, I wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy.

I stopped commenting on the FB DD page because he and some others over there are idiots and have no clue.