Lower unit removal, sordid tale, happy end

halmc

Petty Officer 1st Class
Joined
Feb 27, 2008
Messages
231
As may be seen in another thread I began recently The drive shaft was stuck so badly on my Classic 45 that it ripped out of the lower unit instead of the powerhead, leaving considerable carnage in its path.

Fortunately, the rather thin pinion nut that holds the pinion gear on the end of the shaft rendered up its threads w/o discrenable damage to the threads on the end of the shaft.

Still more fortunately, essentially all of the parts in the way of the shaft ripping out of the lower unit were not only somewhat soft parts, they all come in iBoat's Sierra waterpump kit!

So after buying the waterpump kit from iBoats and a very few proprietary parts from my Merc dealer (three 1/4" studs, two 7/16" studs, the pinion nut, and a cover nut) and accessing the pinion nut (which required partial disassembly of the prop shaft, etc, I am back on the water!

The moral of the story: even in this fairly startling failure, the Merc is robust enough to endure the abuse of repair, and iBoats is standing by with shiny new parts!

IMG_3828.jpg
 

cr2k

Captain
Joined
Mar 19, 2009
Messages
3,730
Re: Lower unit removal, sordid tale, happy end

Hoping you liberally lubed the the top end of the vertical drive shaft with a good spline grease for future removal.
 

halmc

Petty Officer 1st Class
Joined
Feb 27, 2008
Messages
231
Re: Lower unit removal, sordid tale, happy end

Hoping you liberally lubed the the top end of the vertical drive shaft with a good spline grease for future removal.
I applied quite a bit more than the good folks at Mercury apparently did back in the day.

BTW, in response to a PM I received, the big hunk of steel in the image is my Corvette trailer hitch.
 
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