Mercury XR Sportmaster Maintenance
 

Keep your u-bolts torqued to the proper level !!

I think you are on borrowed time on those. Have you pulled anything for a checkup?

At those hours you should remove them and have them inspected by a competent drive shop. I just had to rebuild both of my shorty sportmaster drives at 250 hours on my Fountain. Proper maintenance would be regular fluid changes with a good quality oil.

You will hear many versions of what to do based upon your question. I posed a similar one a while back. My Fountain has 525's with XR's and at the time 350 hours +/-.

I had one drive that had an issue, did not know exactly what the issue was, assumed the worse case. Magnets were showing a real problem and at 10 or so hours the gear lube was dark, on the other drive the magnets by the way were always clean as was the gear lube. I decided that before the thing grenaded itself I would just replace both with new based on my belief that the cost to rebuild would be close to cost to replace. factoring in a little for some good parts of value. My choice, simple as that. Sold the set to an individual on here that is in fact a Merc tech and he went thru both drives.

Let me take this a bit further. Both drives were in pretty much the exact same condition, both were spent. Both needed everything inside, cases and major shafts were all good, rest was spent. Plain worn out, he sent me pics of them after tear down, not broken up, just worn out. These had the gear lube changed every 25 hours, the magnets showed little to worry about, till near the end with the one. You can not go only by the magnets. If you have a real good drive tech near you, by all means have them checked out. With 496's you are not as apt to tear them up but at your hours it would pay to look. I do not have a Bravo super tech near me, so I replaced mine. A real good drive guy should be able to pull the rear and top caps and give you an opinion as to whether you should look deeper. I am not trying to be the Bravo expert here, I have broken my fair share of Bravo chit, had one lock up so hard that it stopped a 525SC dead it it's tracks at 5500 near 100 mph, had another spit the upper gear set near out of the case, had a fresh rebuild last less than 15 minutes.

Sorry for the broken record here. Bravos are like Kia's, when their time is up, best just get a new one and continue on down the road.

The 5 blade maximus don't help your cause either.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.off...3d530d3ff0.jpg




This is the best way to see how they hold up:drink: