What is done to rebuild a TRS gimbal and what is cost to rebuild and clean up and paint one? Who does good work out there?

I had my bravo gimbal done by Ron Bender at JR Marine
440-946-8717 has a exchange program not sure if he does trs or not but probably, real nice guy it was about $225 + shipping give him a call Monday here is his web site good info on their www.jrmarine.com

I've done about a dozen of them. One place to save money is to purchase your bearings and seals through an industrial supplier instead of Merc. My friend owns an electric motor supply and service shop, so I get mine at cost and save a bundle. the steering pins and arms are getting harder to find and are quite costly now, but if you shop you can find them at a good price yet. As for painting, it depends on how high you want the quality to be. I sand blast them and completely start from scratch, doing it the correct way. Most of the one's I've done the customer wanted them painted a custom color anyway. All in all, its not too bad to do. In comparison to the drive, there is only a couple of special tools required, and all of the work is strait forward.

One of the real determining factors here is going to be which style upper swivel pin yours has. There are 3 designs of the upper swivel pin as it was upgraded. If you have a lot of slop in the steering and it has the first design upper swivel pin which has splines on the gimble ring end and splines on the steering arm end then it would be better to replace the entire assembly with the new style. On the newest best design the upper swivel pin is square cut on the gimble ring end and steering arm end. If it's the old splined design then most likely the splines are beat out of the gimble ring and it is not repairable, at least not at a resonable price. It would cost a fortune to convert a old style to new. They have a kit from Merc to make this conversion but last I seen they were like $1600. It would be a lot cheaper to buy a used new style one. They can be identified by having a "U" bolt in the gimble ring at the top. Here is a picture of one on ebay. If you zoom in and look close at the top of the gimble ring you can see the u-bolt. Old style have a allen head bolt going horizontally across the top of the gimble ring in this area. Bearings and seals to rebuild the rest are pretty much all availiable from merc. Like I say though first you need to determine which upper swivel pin design you have to see if it's worth rebuilding.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/TRS-T...item45f7b25332

Thanks, I'll see what model I have, but I think I have the old one.

If you have the old style I may have some square spline ones that I think are OK if you need new pins and tiller arms.