Check Your Stern Drive Alignment!
 

I want to share a bad experience I had when I traded my Mariah Z280 in last week to hopefully save others unecessary expense in the future. I bought the Mariah as a pre-owned versus a brokered boat like the Sea Ray that I traded it in on. As such, I thought the boat, being owned by the marina, had been properly serviced and checked. When I had it brought into the selling dealer, they did a mechanical inspection and found the coupler was out of alignment and worn to the point that they could not sell the boat. I physically verified both the misalignment and the worn coupler so the dealer was not pulling a fast one. The replacement cost me $1,500 because to remove the worn coupler, the engine had to be pulled. The Mercruiser manual said alignment should have been checked every 100 hours and obviously it was not. Futhermore the dealer told me that couplers were particularly troublesome on the 7.4L engines with Bravo 3 drives. Since a number of the Mariah models have this combination, I suggest that over the winter, if it has not been done in the past year, check the alignment. Mercruiser has a tool to check alignment which requires the stern drive to be pulled to perform. If the tool slides in easily, then everything is fine, but if it binds like on my boat, the engine and drive are out of alignment. This has been an issue on the big block engines like the 7.4L because of the higher torque.:(