Re: Dummy guide to boat maintenance
If this is a 10 year old boat, the owner should have stacks of receipts for maintenance and upkeep. A 10 year old boat with 140 hours is not the same as a 10 year old car with low miles. If the boat was only used 14 hours a year on average or maybe 28 hours every other year then the boat has spent a lot of time on the trailer and dry. This is not a good thing as I learned when I purchased my first boat 5 years ago. It was a 8 year old boat and had only 50 hours on it. I ended up replacing just about every gasket, seal, bellows, exhaust joints and anything else rubber because all of these very expensive to replace parts become brittle and dried out with no use. The only reason I mention this is I am trying to help someone else who is new to boating avoid the major pitfalls that I fell into with my first boat. The other thing that you will find is that things like gauges and electrical components will start to fail after 7-9 years of use, the gaskets on gauges dry out and then let water vapor in and before you know it you have a bad gauge. I think Four Winns used a car looking gauge pack that is hard to fix or replace now, on some of their boats so that needs to be carefully looked at as well. Unless you are mechanically inclined, a boat this old is going to be very expensive to maintain unless it has an impeccable record of maintenance.
