F250 With Hole in #6 Piston

I have a friend's F250 sitting in my shop that has a dime sized hole almost dead center in the top of #6 piston. The motor is used pretty hard and has about 1100 hours on it but it has had full maintenance done at least every 100 hours using premium quality 15w40 oil and OEM filters. This motor is one of a fleet of 7 225 and 250 Yamaha 4 strokes that are used on guide boats. No problems with any of the other motors so I'm pretty sure it's not fuel quality. There were no warning signs, it just lost power and then "sounded wierd".

The question now is what caused it and is it worthwhile fixing. At 1100 hours, it's getting close to it's life expectancy. A new powerhead is close to $10K or I could rebuild it for $3-4K but is it worthwhile? Most importantly, I dont want to fix it until I'm sure that whatever caused the piston to pop is corrected.

A few Yamaha techs that I've talked to have never seen this happen to a 250 and can only guess that it might have been an injector problem running too lean on that cylinder.

Does anybody here have any suggestions?

Thanks.

Re: F250 With Hole in #6 Piston

I would suspect an injector issue as well.
pull the injectors,number them and send them to flagship marine and they will flow test them before and after cleaning and send them back with a computer printout of the results.
1100 hours is a barely broken in F250.
if the cyl wall isnt damaged just replace one piston and keep rolling.