1997 speedster bad engine

[Trent Brown]

My Seadoo dual engine (rotax) is in the shop right now and I have been told that the portside (driver side?) engine needs to be rebuilt for $2,500. It went out on Sat. after I replaced a sparkplug in a long problematic cylander. It has always fouled plugs in that cyl. and since reading other threads I have had many of the same smoking and re firing problems in that engine. They told me that there are 182 hours on the engines and that is an awful lot! This is a $17,000 boat and that works out to more than $100 an hour. I am fairly outraged and am ready to park it for I can't see paying that for a rebuild that they say may cause the other engine to fail!

Advice please.

Trent

 

[vilord]

Are you mechanically inclined?
You can get a rebuilt motor from SBTontheweb.com for about $700 or so and put it in yourself in half a day or so with help...

EDIT: Sorry, $745 plus shipping.

 

[kustomkarl]

Trent that 1997 speedster (11 years old )is valued today at about $5,000.00 to $6000.00 in top shape. you could easily replace the engines and still have a lot less invested than selling it, and replacing the boat. 182 hours isn't that many... Here in Florida the typical time in a years use is 100 hrs per year. I have friends here that have over 250 hours on their seadoos in a years time...

Karl

 

[Bent]

2500 dollars divided by 182 = just over 13 dollars an hour... or are you depreciating the entire boat? (If so, then I'll swing by and pick it up for free... LOL).
and that is an excessive repair bill, did they say what components were worn out?

and re-built port side engine isn't any more likely to cause the stbd side engine to fail than trailering the boat to a different repair shop would...

 

[unclejay]

13 years still going strong

My 95 has many hundreds of hours on it, something must have happened to your engine. So before you put in a rebuild, you might want to find the underlying cause. Do you use genuine Sea Doo oil ? Plug conditon ? Any symptoms ?

 

[vilord]

I agree with Bent. And others here... any shop that says 182 hours is excessive use for any boat should be the shop you don't go to.

You say this engine has had problems for a while now, so needing a rebuild of an engine that had problems that were not fixed isn't far fetched, but you shouldn't need to do anything to the starboard engine whether or not you fix this one...

Find a different shop, I say.

 

[Trent Brown]

Thank you all for the advice. I am in Appleton WI and have it a Ecklund motorsports in Oshkosh, the closest sea doo dealer. Any suggestions on how to find a qualified tech to do this job?

I may go the route of buying a rebuilt and have a friend install it with me. If only I had known about this forum when I bought the boat! I do love the boat when it is running and my 9 year old (just started water skiing) is heart broken for this weekend so I know I will get it fixed.

Again thank you all!

 

[vilord]

Hopefully others will be more helpful, but for seadoo dealers in your area (just did a dealer search from seadoo.com), have you tried appleton powersports? they don't sell the boats, but the engine in your boat is no different than that of a PWC, not sure if they'll do it.

There's also simonar sports in luxemburg...

 

[scary]

Not hard to replace a motor yourself i paid a guy here in fla 500.00 to install mine and i watched him do it. Was easy, i also bought a sbt motor