Brokered Boat sale gone bad
 

So, I have a friend who just purchase a boat from a large high dollar broker, under my guidance and a few other friends he did his homework on the boat. Had thorough a survey done, also compression and leak down. Everything seemed to check out, went and looked at it and even checked it with a moisture meter. Ended up hauling it home. Boat was advertised as 165 hours on rebuilds (which matched the hour meters), we get looking at the motors and they are still factory sealed from Merc...all hex bolts wired shut and crimped lead that says merc. A peek in the oil fill revealed they were original valve springs. Scanned the motors and they had 510 and 515 hours on them!

So what action can be taken at this point? Go after the broker? Go after the Surveyor? Or is he just fukked?

why did the survey not include scans of the engines, Im not blaming him, ecm's tell all, Id say he's in trouble unless the broker wants to do the right thing,

I did not know computers would be re-set to 0 hrs when engine rebuilds are done. Is this standard practice ? Is this even possible ?

I'm going to give the sellers and the surveyor the benefit of doubt. In that they rebuilt the motors but didn't clear the hours on the motors when they re-installed them. I can put a new engine in whatever vehicle. If I hook it up to the old computers, etc. On scan it would still show the previous hours. So they may have rebuilt the engine, new internals. But didn't change the ECU or whatever, so it doesn't reflect the true hours on the motors.

Sorry JR I missed the rebuilt engines part

OP says the engines still have their original wire ties/seals from Merc. That rules out the possibility of being "properly" and "fully" rebuilt, no?

Edit: Didn't see F-2's post before I hit submit.

Not a chance they are rebuilt, they are still factory sealed...and there is no resetting the ECMs, not saying it's impossible but people would do it all the time if it was easy.

525's? Blue motors can be factory rebuilt by merc and tagged? While Im not 100% certain, I remember in the recent SVL days the motors were supposed to be factory rebuilt and factory seals...A factory refresh would use same make of springs etc. too...

I took apart some merc sealed motors recently that had crane tie bar lifters. Anything is possible. 515 hours on blue motors I doubt leak down would be perfect.

Can you give us the location-description of these GM tamper-evident bolts? I usually read month-year off main bearings but gotta dig a lil deeper to get them...