Be carefull with Yanmar!

[Captain Bill]

I had problems with my port SD60 in the summer of last year 1 month after the two year warranty expired. Both my saildrives were in a group of serial numbers that had a known issue with the ramp angle of the "forward" gear. Oddly enough I later found out that the ZF SD10 also had this same issue several years before the SD60 was released. Who makes the SD60 for Yanmar, you guessed it, none other than ZF. Whats more ZF came up with a field fix for this problem that involves machining the forward gear. In the US Yanmar decided to use a different approach. They ship a remanufactured gearbox to your Yanmar dealer and they send the old gearbox back to Yanmar and the "field" repair is actually done in a proper machine shop. That being said Yanmar replaced both gearboxes at no charge even though they were a month out of warranty. They were surprised that I actually had gotten so many hours on the unit before it failed as the problem usually showed up right away (less than 100 hours and my failed unit had 1200 hours). I noted that I used left hand props and their "forward " gear was only forward for right hand props which explained why I went so many hours before failure. I may have had 1200 hours in forward but I bet I didn't have 20 in reverse. My Yanmar mechanic had to jump through a bunch of hoops which he did to get everything arranged. I Highly recommend Deaton's yacht services In Oriental NC. They really went to bat for me on this. It took nearly two week to arrange everything and get it shipped, so it is not an instant fix but they did take care of me. I don't know what the arrangement is in the rest of the world, because Yanmar service and parts is run quite differently in the US. I also got a look at Yanmar's parts catalog and at the ZF SD10 catalog and darn if I can see any difference in the drives. Even the list price on the parts is the same. I would note that in the US there are Yanmar certified service centers, but none of them are employees of Yanmar. Just because the mechanic is Yanmar certified does not mean he works for Yanmar. If he is not willing to do all the work to get this repair arranged it is not a failure on Yanmar's part. Now that I'm familiar with the drive I can't imagine that it suddenly going into the wrong gear without a failure in the shift cable mechanism or a change to an opposite handed prop.

Bill

[Tomknor]

I m just thinking about buying a yacht with Yanmar engine. Could write something more about your problem. This is very important to me before choosing.