dhlaw

My tech tells me that I will need to replace the gears in my XR's due to signs of fatigue (pitting). The drives have 181 hours. Are aftermarket gearsets really better? If you were replacing what would the choice be?? I really dont want to be replacing gears that often so I would prefer to spend the $$ now and not worry. Also, I am pretty conservative with the throttle.

rbtnt

You might want to read through this thread and thread listed within this thread. These threads talk about a problem with a production run of XR gears.

http://www.offshoreonly.com/forums/s...ighlight=rbtnt

KAAMA

iTrader: (1)

I don't believe there are any "aftermarket" gears available for the Merc XR Bravo One drive. Even IMCO uses Merc's gears for their X-treme Advantage SC. My XR's are early production from 2000 and we took them apart for inspection and found what appears to be soft pinion gears in them. They have excessive wear on the gears with only 50 hours of use. I had been pretty easy on the throttles. I don't have blowers, but I was running with about 630hp through each naturaly aspirated engine. Now I have about 680hp going through each engine but with only about 1hour of time on them.

What boaters have been finding with the XR is that apparently Merc's supplier of the gears had a bad run of the gears and weren't heat treated correctly----this is what is being said. At this time, there doesn't appear to be any further problems with the gears and their hardness. I had just ordered two new ones. I believe Merc should stand behind their stuff if it isn't right even though I am running more power behind with their drives. If the gears are truely softer, then I had gotten a bad product and Merc should replace them. However, if the gears were heated treated correctly and hard enough then it is probably my fault for the power that I am putting to them and I should burden the costs, and understandably so.