Drained the drive oil and to my horror i find this:


Seems like one thing after another with this old boat. What usually causes this? There were no chunks of metal just real fine metallic particles. And the oil looked fairly clean not burnt. Does the upper start shedding metal first? Would the metal in the oil have worn all the other moving parts inside the drive? I was planning on rebuilding the upper this winter but should i now look into rebuilding the whole thing?


Seems like one thing after another with this old boat. What usually causes this? There were no chunks of metal just real fine metallic particles. And the oil looked fairly clean not burnt. Does the upper start shedding metal first? Would the metal in the oil have worn all the other moving parts inside the drive? I was planning on rebuilding the upper this winter but should i now look into rebuilding the whole thing?