stainless

The engines are supposed to have only 85 hrs on them, and are still under warranty. The claimed overhaul interval is 2000 hrs . Sound accurate ?

stainless

Can you guys recommend a good seatek tech in the new england area ?
What are your thoughts on the overall setup? (Seatek/ asd 8 etc)
Has anyone has any 1st hand experience with the boat? (listed in classifieds)

HabanaJoe

Are these newer Seateks still made with belt driven cams or did they finally step up to gears?

stainless

Not sure , the boat is an 03 ?

HabanaJoe

If it has a cam belt still, you need to change them. The old Seateks we ran had enough failures caused by timing belt stretch similar to a car. When they get loose it was very easy to jump to tooth then valves hit pistons!!!

In the 1990 Venice to Monte Carlo the team had a couple belt jumps and your talking engines with less than your 85 hours!

Your question about 2,000 TBO's? Before you believe the hype do yourself a favor. Call Seatek direct, (they speak english) and ask for the recommended maintenence schedules. They were just writing that stuff back in 1990 so they must have it by now.

Back in the day the Italian meaning of overhaul or TBO and the US meaning of the words were not the same.

The maintainance procedures will tell you whether or not you want to mess with them.

Do you have exotics cars like Ferrari's? My neighbor just got his first Ferrari (360 Spider) and almost passed out at what a major service costs and all the other little things above the service it neeeds when you run the cars hard - he will have a for-sale sign on it soon enough!

My point again - understand how to take care of them before you leap in, you may find they require more maintanance than you think?

Joe Gere

stainless

Thanks Joe !

HabanaJoe

Stainless,

Just one story quick - and a point. The Seatek's are great engines, they have many great features and they packaged it in a small footprint. I wrote about this before on here, but they took many features of big 10's of thousand's of hours lasted features from big industrial engines and made them smaller - great concept.

My story, in my mind when I have to take off heads and re-do valves, not springs I look at that as a half way to an overhaul. Our Cummins, Cat, or DD trucks never needed heads pulled before the bottomend they were all done at one time.

Seatek at the time had something like every 200 hours you needed to re-do the head and that was maintenance in their mind.

My reponse was, I can do that on a $15,000 gas engine why spend $65,000 for the diesel? A customer can replace/rebuild the gas engines every year for 5 year and still be ahead based on the upfront costs plus your "maintenance" costs!!!!

Joe Gere

stainless

The guy's selling the boat at a good price and i like the diesel idea, just not familiar with the seatek engines i'll look into the belt vs gear driven cams. He says he's also got two spare engines he'll throw in as well ? Almost sounds too good to be true ?

HabanaJoe

I know of the boat your looking at, seen it for sale a couple times.

I would have absolutely no reservations in buying it. Even the cam belt issue, it literally took 20 minutes to change them on the old engines, not a big deal just don't forget to change them!!!

My guess with that boat until you take it for a ride is that it is either a idle speed or a running at near full speed boat. Mid-speeds won't be very good?

I base that on nothing but a hunch, you need to run it before you buy and I wish you all the luck in the world - it would be nice to see that boat go to someone that appreciates it!

Joe Gere

29Firefox

Sounds about right for performance diesel engines being run a little hard. The TBO is gonna have a lot to do with how hard you run them. I have 3 customers that own the same kind of boat. 38 Ocean Sport Fisherman with JT Detroit 6V53TI 400hp engines. I overhaul them all the same. One customer gets over 10,000 hours TBO, another gets over 5,000 hours TBO and the third one never makes it to 1500 hrs TBO. The first two overhaul when the engines just start to smoke on start up. The third one over hauls when the engine has major power loss. The first two usually get 20,000 hrs out of a set of connecting rods the third one needs new connecting rods all the time.The difference is in the owner's operating habits. Go easy on those Seateks and they will last longer than the normal TBO. Beat the cr@p out of them and they won't make it to 2000 hrs.