Re: Sterndrive Engineering
I was curious about them two years ago, so I took a trip to their factory in florida. The first thing I found is that they are part of a large company that makes pwc engines ( I forget the name)and occupy a very large industrial complex. From the number of employees and the many buildings full of equipment and stock I doubt they will be going out of business anytime soon. Now for the drives, They do not make any of the parts there. They are all sourced from oem suppliers, supposedly the same manufacturers that supply merc and some of the other aftermarket companies. What I did see was the typical assembly line production, meaning that there were several people, each in charge of putting one or two parts into the case, each with a dial guage or micrometer or torque wrench (with grease pen marks on the dial). It was obvious to me that no-one on the line had any idea why they were putting a part in and checking the tolerance, or what that tolerance meant, but they were very methodical about making sure that their guage was on the mark. Everything looked pretty good except they did the paint work there, and from what I saw and later confirmed in the field (which I reported back to them)their paint lasts less than one season in fresh water before it comes off. I'm not talking about a few flakes.....I'm talking about half of the drive being bare.<br />I picked up two drives while I was there. When I went to install the drives (on my boat) I found that one had a stripped out lower drain plug hole (this of course happened after the upper and lower were put together and both drives installed on the boat) I shipped that one back, two days later I had a replacement. I used the drives for the season and after a repaint(of the drives) sold the boat. The person I sold the boat to knew all about their drives....he had one on his "old boat", and had no problems with his. Those drives are still running fine with no problems. I have since used four more of their drives, so far with no problems. One of the drives came back into the shop (the boat needed other repairs) and I noticed it now had all of the official decals of a merc alpha on it, it seams that since these drives were sold without any decals (they have since changed this) the owner picked up some decals from that online auction place that has the word "bay" in it. Although all of the parts are supposed to be interchangeable and the specs the same.....beware, there may be several aftermarket drives out there that are now "wearing" the Merc Alpha badges. In fact, if you go to that auction site and do a search for Merc and decal, you will find several sellers of these every single week (if these are genuine decals, perhaps Merc should require a valid serial number before selling replacements). Before this turns into a book, I think the SEI drives are OK, and fill a void in the market place, I have had no real problems with them, the company seams responsive, and the price is right. The big thing is for everyone to know what they are getting, and to discourage people from "dressing them up" to look like the genuine factory units.
