CONFESSIONS OF A BOAT MECHANIC

   You’re heading down the Intracoastal Waterway on a nice, sunny day. Your wife is seated contentedly next to you. Traffic is light. Sea birds wheel and dive. Only a few hours away, you’ll pull into a marina in a quaint little unexplored town, have a nice dinner, maybe do some antiquing. . . This is the way the Good Lord meant man to live.
   Suddenly, there’s a vibration in the port engine. You check the gauges. The vibration gets worse. You have no choice, you
shut it down. Now you’re limping toward port. What appeared as a rosy day-dream suddenly looms as Apocalypse Marina.
You need a mechanic.
   What? Trust this boat, this darling of your desires, to a strange mechanic? You’d rather trust your wife for a weekend with the Seventh Fleet.
   What do you do? Did you bump a submerged object back there and not know it? Is it your fault? The manufacturers? Who’s going to pay for
this? Warranty? Insurance? You? How do you find a good  mechanic? Are you going to get screwed? .
   All these guys are knuckle dragging apes with brains that don’t understand a heat-exchanger, but can easily calculate an overcharge within 400 percent. Right?
   Let me tell you up front, there’s a lot of mistrust both ways. Sadly, a lot of it is justified. Both ways. I guess the important question is: Why?
But let’s address the immediate problem first: How do you find a good mechanic?

Deus Ex Machina

   Frankly, you do it by word of mouth and a lot of good luck. This goes for being in transit and in your own neighborhood. Obviously, it’s a lot easier at home.
But if you’re going on a cruise, before you shove off, ask your friends if they can recommend any mechanics along the way.
   I guess one of the first things you could do is try to find somebody certified to work on your kind of engine. The only way I know to do that is to
call the distributor and ask him for a list of qualified mechanics in whatever town you’re stuck in. You may get lucky here. Or better, get a list before
you leave home.
   Is there anything else you can do? This is a tough call, but you can try to size the guy up. If he shows up on the dock with a brand-new Craftsman toolbox…..
I mean, I don’t like to put names on things, but I doubt he’s a good mechanic.
   If he comes down with Snap-On tools and he looks like he’s got the right stuff and this, that and the other, at least he’s motivated in the right direction.
   Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying a good marine mechanic can’t have Craftsman tools, but he’s got to look the part. He should not come down wearing
boots soaked in oil. He should be prepared to cover sofas and move carpets. He should be careful and courteous.
   Most of all, be aware of his attitude. He should be inquisitive. You’d be surprised at how much a good, attentive mechanic can learn from an owner
(and vice versa). Sometimes we can even solve problems over the phone.
   A good marine mechanic is a jack-of- all-trades. Rebuilding an engine is just a fraction of what a mechanic does. It takes a special knack to work on
engines in a boat. He’s got to be a little bit of a carpenter, a little bit of an air-conditioning man and electrician. He’s got to understand boats. He’s got to care.
   Sometimes you send a guy to paint a bottom, for instance. He may spot other trouble and not say anything. He may not even look for other problems.
“Hey, I’m a bottom painter…”.
   The good marine mechanic will spot the leaks around the struts, or a cracked propeller. . . he can see a million different things. Sure, it’s work for the yard,
but it’s also down-time for the boat.
   This, of course, can lead to the most common cause of friction between owners and yards:

The “Inflated” Bill

   Here’s the situation: A guy is taking his boat down the ICW and after the third day, it won’t start. He calls a mechanic and says, hey, I got a bad starter on a
Detroit Diesel 6-92. Mechanic says, okay, we know they all use the same starter, standard Delco; $185 for a rebuilt starter, plus my labor. Two hours on average.
So he gives a quote. The owner says, I’m flying home, go do it.
   The mechanic gets down there and he finds one problem after another, and the next thing you know, the owner gets a bill for $3,000 and he goes berserk.
   This can get out of whack so quickly.
   But, look; a guy comes in and asks me to give his stern-drive-powered runabout a tune-up. I figure it up and the guy says okay. Then the mechanic comes back up
and says, this guy never changed his spark plugs. Ever. They’re all rusted and broken off. Now a simple job has become a pain in the rear.
   This owner is a businessman, right? And like any businessman, when he brings his boat in he wants an estimate. A quote. A figure we both can live and die by.
Give me an estimate and keep it within 10 or 15 percent, he says.
    I can’t do it. You go out on what’s supposed to be a one-day job and it turns into a two-day job
and all of a sudden you’re 100 percent over and the customer says, you can’t even keep it within 50 percent?
   I’ll be blunt with you. The only way I can give a real, true estimate is if I inflate it so much to cover my butt that no matter what happens, I’m covered. I tell people,
look, I give you a quote for $5,000 and here I am a third of the way into the job and already it’s $3,000. You want me to stick to the estimate? You know what
I’m going to do? I’m basically going to have to cheat you to get this job into the quote.
    I hate to say this, but in a lot of cases, it goes back to the old saying that if you have to ask how much it is, you can’t afford it.

Cost Of Owning

   An example: A guy owns a 35’ sport- fisherman and we repower it for him. Broker calls up and says, we’ve got a buyer for your boat and we can put you in a 42’
that’ll knock your socks off. The guy thinks, I can’t afford not to do this. So he trades up.
   Now, he’s gone from a boat that burns 23 gallons an hour to a boat that burns 49. He goes from $1,200 a pair for propellers to $3,600 a pair. His $600 shafts now run $1,200.
   A lot of guys get caught up in this, particularly with the older boats. They’re such a bargain—until you figure the cost of maintenance and operation.
   Take an oil change. With a car, you can go into Jiffy Lube and in 10 minutes you can have an oil change, a grease job, for what, $27? People don’t realize that with a boat,
you have to pick up all your stuff, lug it down to the dock. Crank up the engines and get them warm. If it doesn’t have a pump-out system, you have to pump it out. And then you have to dispose of the oil—lug it backup to the shop. With a gas engine, this is no big deal. But diesels? A 6-71 holds 32 quarts. This costs money. The owner gets the bill and says:
for an oil change? It’s not an hour’s job, it’s a day’s.
   There’s a psychology here, too. An owner walks in and you say, it’s going to cost you $50,000 for this job and he says, no way. He walks. But if you get him started on it and he
sees what you’re doing, he’ll open his pockets. He won’t mind.
   I had the salesman from a diesel engine-maker come in here and ask me how much I made on an $18,000 engine. I said $500. He flipped.” You’re selling it for $500 over cost?”
I said, sure; you want me to mark it up 25 percent? If I took that engine and marked it up like that and made $5,000 to $6,000 on each one, plus my labor, the price of this repower would be so out of whack I wouldn’t get much work. But, if I make a reasonable profit on parts and labor, it gets it down where people can live with it. And in the long run, that’s better for business.
   People think marinas have a monopoly on everything, that they can get what they want. And some operate that way. But it comes back to haunt them.

Who’s To Blame?
 
   Frankly, most of the problems can be laid not at the feet of owner ignorance or carelessness (although these can figure into it), but at the shiny brogans of the builders. They do a lot of stupid stuff.
    The toughest cases tend to be from custom builders. They build one or two of a model and they don’t have time to work out the bugs.
   Production builders, on the other hand, usually fiddle with the first half- dozen boats down the line and get most of the kinks out. They have more chances to get it right.
   Take propellers. Propellers are not made in pairs. They are made in righthand and lefthand. And at the propeller plant there’s probably a thousand on the righthand shelf, and a thousand on the lefthand shelf. An order comes in for a pair and a clerk pulls one from each and ships them out. Blades and blade areas are fairly close, but the real problem is with cups. The guy who cups the starboard prop doesn’t cup the port. If you look at them, it’s like night and day. No correlation. You can imagine what that does to performance.
   And if you weigh a lefthand and a righthand prop, one might weigh 27 pounds, the other 24. Three pounds shouldn’t make much difference in how they spin, but it could mean the blades on the 27-pounder are thicker or there’s more blade area. That can make a big difference. We see this mostly with new boats and during propeller changes.
   Engines? There can be a big horsepower difference between two identical gas engines, but not much between diesels. I don’t think on a diesel engine you’d be more than three or four percent off between one and another. It’s not the tolerance, but the precision with which the injectors are built. With gas, and carburetors, it’s different.
   Look at some Qf the dumb things builders do:
• They staple down the carpet so we can’t get at the engine hatches without tearing it all up.
• They put little hatches into the engine room that are fine if you have to get down in there, but what about getting an engine out?
• They put things where you can’t get at them. On one big sportfisherman I worked on recently, the port engine starter was on the outboard side in the back where there’s a fuel tank. The only way to get to the starter is to take the whole exhaust system off on the port side. This takes a day or more. Then, before you can get at the starter, you have to lift the engine up because there’s a mount right there.
   And you wonder why the owner goes nuts when he gets the bill? If the starter had been mounted inboard, we might be talking about a couple-hour job.

The Good, Bad, Ugly

   Actually, sometimes the “bad” customers turn out to be really good allies. But there are people out there who make life difficult for everybody.
   Suppose an owner comes in and is too specific. You say to yourself, okay, this guy says he has a vibration and it’s the port propeller. You know that’s notthe problem, but the guy has this attitude
   Owners should not tell you how or what to do. They can help a lot by giving information. This is like going to a doctor and saying I hurt here, inject some cortisone. . . right here. Would you do that? Leave it to the doctor—to the mechanic—to diagnose and cure.
   Should the owner be on the boat while the mechanic is doing the work? Depends on the person. If he’s going to be like Dagwood and stick his head under the sink and tell the plumber what to do, no.
   But sometimes there’s an advantage to having him there. If he leaves in the morning and comes back in the afternoon, he has no idea what you’ve been through. If he was there and saw how diligently and hard you worked, he’ll appreciate it.
   On the other hand, most of these guys will try to get you to do more than what you’re charging for. Okay, Doe, we got the tennis elbow, now, about this ankle...
   For the same price.
   Sometimes the customer has a legitimate complaint about work. But there is always the guy who has a lot of work done, you let him go, he owes you. He’s going down the river and “something happens.” Now he has an excuse not to pay. . . and he’s out of state.
   There are some real snakes out there. I had one recently, an attorney. He stopped payment on a check. I call him up. You know what he says? Sue me! Turns out he has a history of doing this. And he knows he’s got you. You go to court, the first thing they order is arbitration. You’re only going to get half.
   Customers have forced a lot of mechanics to become real hard cases.

We Don’t Get No Respect...

   But most good mechanics aren’t tough to deal with, Just treat them as you’d like to be treated. A mechanic is a professional. He should be respected for what he does and what he’s accomplished. If he is treated with the respect he deserves, you’re going to generate a better attitude—and end up with more from him.