Hack.. I have a brand new set... :)
http://www.offshoreonly.com/forums/s...ers-525-a.html

I never had any idea that the failures and problems were this wide spread and they seem to keep coming. This is really a horrible situation for both CMI and the Mercury Racing engine customers. This is also not good for the industry and such as it just helps nail another coffin nail in the performance marine industries barely floating ship!

Just my two cents here and some of my simple engineering training and experience, but CMI's idea for this "cool collar" gap between the outer header pipe and the header flange seems like a mistake to me. My thought here is that these headers are fairly heavy to begin with and they tend to vibrate and flex when the engine torques and the boat slams or pounds as all do. This reduction in the strength of two pipes welded to the flange would seem to put a lot of stress at the bottom welds and added heat from a section exposed to 1250 to 1400 degree inside exhaust gas temperatures with no outer cooling. If a lot of the cracking problems are showing at this location then I think my thought and ideas may be well founded.

In getting heads around this header problem, if Mercury pushed their ideas, production designs, material and method specs. on CMI, then I also think Mercury should step up and bear some of the cost and responsibility for this problem that obviously many of their customers have suffered. I know some would say that once they are out of warranty the responsibility supposedly ends, but if Mercury and CMI were responsible for a obvious down the road problem for their engine customers I would think they should have let the customers know at purchase time that they may be experiencing these possible issues down the road as they do with valve train life issues and have made time certain checks on the headers for customers to make sure they do not loose engines and such. If these headers have a fixed life in use then just define it and let the customer know he has to budget and plan for replacement before failures occur.
In any event I as well as most in the industry would like to see this kind of product problems slow and stop and see the performance boaters stop suffering through these kinds of expensive and costly problems. This is bad for all in the sport and industry!
I feel that CMI headers have always been considered an excellent product for most of their history and I hope they can return to problem free products and a great viable future for our industry.

Best Regards,
Ray @ Raylar

Very well said Ray... I don't know if Mercury Racing and/or CMI read these threads, but there are a TON of performance boating customers that are being left hanging here with NO apparent help OR EVEN ADVISE (!) from the very people that we as consumers trusted with our hard earned dollars!

CMI and Mercury Racing should at the very least CLEARLY define the problems and issues here. It's WAY past the time that they should have shed some light on these faulty headers and resulting catastrophic failures, rather then leaving all of us in the dark and fending for ourselves!

:angry-smiley-038:As for my 525 boat - I knew something was wrong when I a valve went byebye:grinser010: Had to rebuild both those motors and that was $25K or so if I recall correctly.

In my 700 boat - I notice water leaking from where the header connects to the tail pipe with the clamp. It was dripping from that area - should never have watter there. Pulled #8 plug and pumped the gulf of MX out of it. You can ck it a few different ways.
1. Just as I explained
2. Pull the header and pressure ck it. Might only need to pull it off and see it has water in it
3. Pull plugs and ck them

After I had these issues and talking with 2 friends with Donzi's and 525's. they pulled theirs to pressure ck them and out of 8 headers - go ahead and guess -----------5 were leaking.

If CMI admitted fault and had a recall, it would cost them huge. Then you would have unrelated problem customer trying to get warranty also. But they should do something. I am looking to drop, to me alot of money on a fairly new boat and have to worry about headers leaking and spend aditional large dollars after, that's BULL. As someone said earlier they should post bullitins and tell us what to look for but this would be admitting guilt.
I never realized it was such a big problem, my gill's are looking pretty good right now!!

This very problem STOPPED me last year form making an offer on a NEW 2007 38 DONZI ZR leftover!!!!!!
Dean

There have been 7 sets of CMIs replaced this year in my area.

So I assume Smarty has had no problem getting people to give him a call?

I lost my motor to this over a month ago. Dropped a valve and it was done. I run solid lifters I know to check every so often for lash. No questions no problems fix if need to. An understanding like that would have saved 15k. This is boating we are used to it but I think we always new clock was ticking on certain things.
I know they make things that do not break look at their navy stuff.

Unfortunately, he was banned from OSO couple weeks ago.