Oil injection or not....

[jscheller]

Hey guys I am new to iboats but saw some comments about this after a google search. I have just bought a 2001 bass tracker with a 2001 Mercury 40 HP 2 stroke on it. I know this motor is oil injected and I have never had a boat with this. My first and only boat I've had was a small john boat with a 15 HP Mercury 4 stroke on it so I never had an issue. The question is are oil injectors safe or should I premix my oil? I'm not very knowledgeable about motors in general so I really am clueless here. Any advice will be great. Thanks

 

[kmarine]

I myself like to add oil the first tank and measure how much oil per tank the injection system is pumping before I trust it. they are reliable systems but if they fail you have a big problem. after a while you should know how much oil you burn per tank of fuel and if the system is working properly.

 

[Faztbullet]

The bottom driven oil pumps are highly reliable on these motors and rarely fail.....

 

[CharlieB]

Merc oiling systems are quite reliable and have been used for a great number of years.

Cleanliness of oil is critical. About the only problem is the plastic gear used on the V6 models, and they are usually fine until the motor is hot-rodded and sped up well over the factory recommended RPM range.

kmarine makes a very good point, to monitor the oil usage until you gain confidence and also that it becomes second nature to tend to your oil.

The worst thing you can do is run it out of oil

 

[WrenchHead]

Both systems reply on an oil pump. The oil pumps are probably the most reliable component of the engines.

 

[mgjtkt]

Bottom line is -Do you trust your memory and your friends memory ( to add the oil ) over a product that has run millions of hours. Most meltdowns are caused by dirty carbs ( lean condition) rather than oil pump problems. IMO

 

[1nebel0]

Mix.....you will never lose a motor to oil pump failure no matter how good Merc's are... I believe in Merc but I like mixing..Always have and always will...never will lose a motor should an oil line break if you are not checking under the hood often..They get brittle and fail..plain and simple..why chance it..just my 02

 

[aussieflash]

Mix.....you will never lose a motor to oil pump failure no matter how good Merc's are... I believe in Merc but I like mixing..Always have and always will...never will lose a motor should an oil line break if you are not checking under the hood often..They get brittle and fail..plain and simple..why chance it..just my 02

Until your friend forgets to pre mix one time....or gets the ratio wrong.....Machines will die only once but humans always make mistakes.Mine is going strong for over 26 years.If its blowing blue smoke its working.God bless 2 strokes.

 

[Texasmark]

I removed my drive gear after 10 years just for grins. Got some horrow stories from some folks on here, particulars not known necessarily. Talk was about a plastic gear and that bothered me. Have since found out it's Phenolic and having seen numerous work functions on things like the Ford 300 cu in I6 cam drive gear being Phenolic, actually having one apart and seeing what it looked like after several hundred thousand miles, and using it in industry I ceased to be worried. But by then the gear was out.

I don't/didn't loan my boat and I wrote on the transom adjacent to the fill tube to add oil.

Do what makes you feel good so that you can sleep at night and worry about something else.

Mark

 

[wired247]

Its plastic. Phenolics are plastic too but the oil pump drive gears that Mercury puts on their cranks are absolutely and definitely NOT phenolic plastic ( Phenol Formaldehyde Resin aka bakelite ) . Probably UHMWPE polyethylene or maybe Polyacetal-C .Call them polymer if it makes you feel better but they are surely not phenolic based. Ive seen that before and don't know where that got started, Old Chevy cam gears used phenolic plastics to absorb vibrations and that might be it. Rule of thumb is if you can move it with your fingernail its not phenolic. If it smells faintly like formaldehyde it is phenolic.

Under 6K leave them alone. Over 6K premix.


Guy who spent too many years working in a plastics factory.

 

[Texasmark]

Its plastic. Phenolics are plastic too but the oil pump drive gears that Mercury puts on their cranks are absolutely and definitely NOT phenolic plastic ( Phenol Formaldehyde Resin aka bakelite ) . Probably UHMWPE polyethylene or maybe Polyacetal-C .Call them polymer if it makes you feel better but they are surely not phenolic based. Ive seen that before and don't know where that got started, Old Chevy cam gears used phenolic plastics to absorb vibrations and that might be it. Rule of thumb is if you can move it with your fingernail its not phenolic. If it smells faintly like formaldehyde it is phenolic.

Under 6K leave them alone. Over 6K premix.


Guy who spent too many years working in a plastics factory.

All the Phenolics I saw/used were like the Ford cam drive gear, reinforced with a fabric and were hard, having the color of the Formaldehyde Resin. I never actually saw the Merc. gear. You are probably correct on the noise thing. Years ago we were told that the nylon teeth (what appeared to be nylon) on the drive gear on the V8 cam shaft were for that purpose also. We knew better. After about 80k miles the material would get brittle and some of the teeth would break off allowing the cam to crank timing to shift and good bye engine. So off you go to guy a NEW car........... Don't remember when they went back to all metal. I can remember changing out half a dozen on the "rent a wrecks" I bought for the kids while growing up. I'd put in the after market metal gears, bronze as I recall. In one specific instance I purchased a small block '71 Chev 2 door HT. I had just gotten it and serviced it. I parked it and turned off the key. In it's last several revolutions while stopping I heard a very definite metal to metal clunk. Oh oh. Didn't sound good. Tried to restart and it wouldn't with big matallic noises. Popping the cam gear cover there was the smoking gun. Replacement engine I bought at a salvage yard got the gears before I installed it.

Mark

 

[robert graham]

Another endlessly debatable subject but for myself I greatly prefer premix for the simplicity and dependability....no oil tanks, pumps, hoses, etc. that can and may fail at some point in time causing great motor damage. One other advantage of premix that is sometimes not mentioned is the constant fuel/oil mixture that at low RPM's like idling, trolling and at motor shut down/lay-up will leave more protective oil film on crank area bearings and shiny metal surfaces than the oil injection systems that run a very thin fuel/oil mixture at slow motor speeds....

 

[gm280]

Never having anything but 2-cycle premix engines...yet, I love to read these comments about why and why not somebody likes or doesn't like things. And this thread hasn't left me with anything positive one way or the other. My thinking is oil injection has to work and work really well for them to continue building such designed engines. And their reliability is usually dependent upon the owner servicing such things as well. Any neglected engine will certainly cause issues down the road for certain. So if you take really good care of it, I can't see oil injection really being any problem. And they do have sensors that if the oil stops flowing, the engine shuts down. So if I had to buy a new engine, oil injection wouldn't bother me in the least. But then again JMHO!

 

[Texasmark]

Another endlessly debatable subject but for myself I greatly prefer premix for the simplicity and dependability....no oil tanks, pumps, hoses, etc. that can and may fail at some point in time causing great motor damage. One other advantage of premix that is sometimes not mentioned is the constant fuel/oil mixture that at low RPM's like idling, trolling and at motor shut down/lay-up will leave more protective oil film on crank area bearings and shiny metal surfaces than the oil injection systems that run a very thin fuel/oil mixture at slow motor speeds....

My service manual said that the ratio for my '02 90 hp Merc triple was 1 part oil to 80 parts fuel at idle increasing the oil to 1 part oil to 50 parts fuel. Years ago on here was some talk about corrosion in engines in Florida for one. Said something about dino oil did a better job of protecting from corrosion. Well my limited experiences with syn. oil over the last 15 years is that it remains on the surfaces better proven by an '88 Ford 5 liter.

So, regardless of the oil used, if idle is only 80:1 and you shut your engine down after idling not turning the key off at WOT then one would surmise that premix would work in your favor.

This subject is rolling along. It's 2 am. I'm waiting for Santa to come down the chimney and I can't sleep. So I'm sitting here blabbing.

Merry Christmas

Mark