Need to check something I heard

[james]

My boat neighbor’s boat was getting service done on the power plants. He has QSB 5.9’s on Zues drives, I think they are putting out 480 HP. While chatting with the mechanic, I mentioned that I had 6cta 8.3’s and that I take the Aftercoolers off every 2 years to disassemble, clean, lube and reassemble. The mechanic said that with they waited for engine temps to rise, then would take care of the process above.

That seemed very wrong to me, but perhaps things have changed with the Q series.

Thoughts?

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dale T Jones

Topic

[james]

An hour can save 10

Rob – You are correct, I believe in fixing things before they are broke and taking action at the first sign of trouble. I’ve got the aftercooler on and off thing down to about 30 minutes a side, that effort will end up saving me a fortune over time.

Also, when detected black smoke at cruise speed (Faint, but noticible), we stopped running the boat on plane and spent a few months debugging. Turned out we had turbo’s which were only putting out about 16 PSI boost max. So by easing back on the throttles, we didn’t dump a lot of fuel into the cylinders to burn up the valves.

So, if you see, hear or smell something off, investigate and fix, otherwise little things become huge expenses.

[Rob Schepis]

Preventative Maintenance

Well that certainly goes against the concept of preventative maintenance which is to service something while it is still working without issue. However being a do it yourself owner you have the luxuries of staying far ahead of the curve. Not many boat owners would want to pay for that kind of service on such a high frequency rate.

Another plus to a good preventative maintenance plan is doing as much as possible on YOUR schedule. No matter where you boat there is always a season and nobody wants to miss the heart of the season with downtime that could have been avoided. We’ll leave those midseason downtimes to Mother Nature.

[Author]

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