A friend is looking at a Correct Craft Sport Nautique with a Ford 5.8 HO PCM GT-40.

I gather that this is an iron block fuel injected 351 with GT40 heads; basically an F150 motor with Mustang GT(40) heads on it.

It has 825 hours, and has never been winterized or exposed to salt; and always stored in a heated garage.

It appears to be a pretty decent package. But I don’t know much about ski boats. Anything to watch out for regarding this engine?

Worked on plenty of these back in the day. PCM -- Pleasure Craft Marine made a lot of these engines for the tournament ski boats back in the day. Fuel pressure is important. That round fuel cell on the motor has a filter inside as well so many never get changed and that needs to be changed out once per year min. and checked for water. Depending how bad internally that cell is - the fuel injectors can and will suffer. If the engine runs hot for a while the heads to exhaust manifold flange will warp. Also look for rust at the bottom of the exhaust manifolds . In due time especially never winterizing they will leak water at the bottom.



Also most of these boats has key pad start and stop -- key less system - those we had to change a lot to new but even the new key pads would fail in due time. I remember changing 3 to 5 key pads out in many of the same boats back in the day. I do not see these boats anymore but did about 11 years ago and back to when they were brand new.. Many were closed bow as well that had this Ford GT 40 engine.


The block itself held up well especially for the ones whom did not winterize properly or missed draining them. These engines idled very well actually really well. Also they had good pulling torque and really good acceleration - hence why the a lot skiers liked that engine. Currently many parts are hard to get for it so that would be the hard part buying this app. Also not many shops will work on these anymore period. If I recall correctly that fuel cell has been updated. Anyways just a jist of info I posted for you here. I have more but hard to type all that out

Thank you John. I truly appreciate your input!

Your Welcome and MY BAD I forgot to give the fuel pressure here. Watching some Football today.

Low pressure pump is 6 psi
high pressure pump is 39 psi
PCM for the high pressure allows 3 psi plus or minus but the low pressure pump can not be below 5 psi. 5 psi is the bare min. 6 psi is spot on for the LPP.

Also should mention these engines take a whole different realm of diagnostic tools than what Merc and GM engines use. The EFI system is called EEC-IV -- there is a break out box for that and a Star Tester basically the scan tool we used back then for these engines.

I do have all the manuals and service manuals and diagnostic manuals for these engines as well, but I would have to pull all that out of storage. We were trained and cert on all PCM engines and I still am currently