Help!! Bravo 1 no forward or reverse and will not free spin in neutral.

[Steve302]

Hey Everyone

My wife and myself had an interesting cruise tonight. I have a 1990 arriva 2450 with a 7.4 merc with bravo 1 outdrive.

We were cruising up the St Lawrence river where we live tonight at around 3800 RPM when out of nowhere with no bangs or smells I lost all forward drive and the motor began to spin freely. I did have my hand on the throttle so I did not over rev the engine thankfully as i was able to get off of it right away.

Now the boat will not shift into forward or reverse and even when in neutral if i try to spin the prop with the engine cut off it will not spin at all it is stuck in place. I restarted the engine after I tried to spin the prop by hand thinking it may be stuck in gear but when I checked on the prop with the engine running it was not spinning.

I'm really afraid that i've had some kind of drive failure which has locked up my drive and in turn stripped out my coupler due to being fairly high in the RPM's when the failure occured. has anyone seen anything like that?

I should say that the other day when i was running the boat it felt as though my prop was losing traction in the water. I have a gps and I was watching my speed and it would begin to drop and the rpm would increase and then all of the sudden you could feel the boat hook back up and the engine would sound like it would take on a load and my speed would jump back up. I removed my prop thinking I may have spun the hub out of my stainless mirage but my hub was fine so I (wrongfully) assumed it was probably a trim issue and my prop was maybe catching some air. I have read on some posts about cone clutches slipping so im not sure if it could be related to what i have going on but figured I would include this in case someone has had this experience. This happened on the water around 10PM tonight and when I finally got back to my dock at the marina the mosquitos were so bad I had to close it up for the night and run for cover but tomorrow I will get it on the trailer and take the drive off and see what I can see.

I more or less just needed to vent as i'm afraid my already short boating season has come to an end and would like to hear what other peoples take on this is with what little info i can provide tonight.

so much for watching the canada day fire works on the boat tomorrow night. this will be the first time i've been on land for canada day in probably ten years

Thanks for listening to my rambling it was a pretty stressfull experience being pulled in by a very nice but i assume very inexperienced new boater who did not compensate for our fast current in the river and passed close to a nav bouy and nearly ran me into it. i managed to steer with my drive just enough to miss it by about 2 ft then i changed my shorts bit my tongue and thanked him for the tow haha.

Steve

 

[Fun Times]

Sorry to hear of your troubles tonight.

Unfortunately depending on what locked up inside the drive, you could damage the engine coupler as a result. If the input shat kept turning, your coupler could still be ok.

Be sure to inspect the coupler the best you can before and after the drive removal.

You'll want to drain the gear oil then pull the top and back cap covers for inspection. You'll need a 3/8" 12 point socket to pull the two covers. Hope it's nothing too serious, good luck.

 

[Steve302]

Ok so got it out of the water this afternoon and it's not looking good. I am able to turn my prop about 1/4 turn but can hear some nasty crunching noises inside the drive so that's not great news. The other thing I noticed this morning that I could not see last night is my bilge is full of drive oil. It is strange though is that the hose going into the bilge is ruptured and was slowly leaking oil into my bilge one small drip at a time. my reservoir was still half full this morning even with the line dripping so I'm not sure if the ruptured hose allowed my drive to empty all of its oil into my bilge last night which caused the failure or if when the failure happened there was some pressure spike or shrapnel that cut the hose. It's extremely tight in there and I couldn't get a great look. It does look like at some point it came out at high pressure because it sprayed my transom with oil over a much larger area than I could see it dripping on today.

 

[Steve302]

Meant the hose going from drive to reservoir realized I wasn't very clear on that.

 

[tpenfield]

Have you pulled the outdrive off yet? That would be good to see if it can spin freely. You will also be able to look at the coupler and splines.

 

[Bt Doctur]

Turning the prop and hearing/feeling crunching sounds like upper unit damage, losing oil into the bilge if not the hose is most likely a bad seal # 12

 

[Steve302]

Ok got the out drive off the boat and split the upper and lowers and it's the vertical shaft has snapped and the mechanic can't get it out of the lower as it seems siezed in the lower. Also the oil seemed to be under pressure in the drive as it ruptured my hose going to the reservoir and when we went to drain the drive it came out with a lot of pressure. How could that happen?

 

[Fun Times]

See if the link below will make things more cost efficient for you.... If there is a hole in the hose between the gear oil bottle and the transom assembly and there is still oil in the bottle, then that would seem to indicate that the oil bottle is clogged with an oily sludge build up (< common) and wasn't supplying enough oil to the drive along with not telling you a story that you need to keep adding oil to the bottle making you wonder why it's using oil. With the oil bottle being full, you figured all was good. The oil bottle should be "completely cleaned" every year or two to remove oil sludge buildup.

http://www.sterndrive.cc/Mercruiser-Bravo-One-Sterndrive-Lower-Only.html