Re: mercruiser L-Drive: what motor have I got?
don't feel bad, my first boat purchase a few years ago wasn't so hot either.
I was looking for an aluminum open skiff 16-18' long. I had shopped for weeks without much luck and I had a pre approved loan burning a hole in my pocket. Finally I found it! It was exactly what I was looking for, in my price range and well kept up. It did however, have a crazy welded aluminum hardtop, custom made and bolted to the console, with old GPS and 16 mile radar on top. On a 16' boat! Still, I was tired of shopping so I bought it, thinking in the back of my head how eventually that top would have to go. We started using the boat and right away could tell that the top was actually a hazard, making the boat way too top heavy, and after a couple of close calls in a few weeks, I finally bit the bullet and disassembled all the electronics and pulled the top, about 100# of beautifully welded aluminum that is now sitting in my pasture.
Boat was happy, I was happy, all good right?
A while later I was fishing out in the ocean and it was a sloppy day and I kept having to run the bilge pump, which was puzzling since it wasn't raining that much. On the way back over the bar the boat was really struggling over the waves and there was a lot of water sloshing around in there no matter how much I ran the pump. When we returned I realized the pump was shot, so I replaced it and we went out again the next day with a new pump, except the boat still kept getting wet and this time the pump was working.
When we pulled it out that day, I looked the boat over carefully and found a crack on one chine that was over 30" long! and a smaller one on the other side....
no wonder it kept getting wet! I had to strip the boat down to a bare hull, where I found that the previous owner, being too lazy to pull the floors to route his new fuel line and wiring, had cut out the corners of several stringers to make a new wireway. And then bolted this insane top heavy thing into the same stringers, where it worked and worked until it had cracked welds all over the place underneath the floor. I had removed the problem, but too late to help. The stringer welds were probably already cracked when I bought it.
Fortunately for me, there is a really good aluminum welder nearby, and he fixed it all up, better than new, for less than $400 and I am still using that boat now, after a few days worth of labor disassembling and reassembling the whole boat...
But boy, what a lesson!
