Yamaha F300 4.2L V6 Outboard Errors: Anyone have any knowledge?

[Sweet_Pea]

We received two errors on our F300 Yamaha display on our R27-OB in the past few weeks.

After a couple days at Roche Harbor, we saw a sync error on the Yamaha display about the fuel level on start up. Where we should see fuel remaining, the display was blank.

By happenstance, Yamaha dealer Tom & Jerrys in Mt Vernon was scheduled to do a 100 hour service the next day, so we asked them to check it out. The notes passed back to us from the dealer said "TECH PULLED THE SENDER AND RECALIBRATED IT--COMPLETED." They charged us two hours and $350 for this.

While our boat has only a bit over 80 hours, it is over a year old. We purchased in the fall of 2023 and didn't use it over the winter. So, Yamaha says this is not covered by warranty. The dealer told us this issue is "considered a maintenance item".

The Yamaha owner's manual has nothing in it about calibration. Maybe it's in the service manual, but we don't have one.

We asked the factory about this and Kenny Mars said he's "never needed to recalibrate a fuel sender". Ivan also said they don't calibrate the sender and wondered if the connectors on top of the fuel tank (visible when you lift the center lazarette) might have been loose and if the tech disconnected and reconnected them? If so, hardly required 2 hours of servicing!

After the service, we turned on the engine and saw another error:

We turned the display off and back on and the error disappeared. Ran this by the dealer and he's going to run it by his tech. He did mention that a trainee did the service on our boat under the guidance of an experienced tech. May be irrelevant, just mentioning.

We'd be interested to know if anyone else has encountered these errors? And, does anyone have a service manual and can look up if it contains information about recalibration for the fuel sender?

We're hoping these are just hiccups and not indicative of an issue with our system.

Thanks!

 

[Pandion]

I'm not sure what year your RT27OB is but you likely have a Yamaha 6YC display for your F300 outboard. The error messages on the engine display are very generic and don't really correspond to the specific diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs) that are defined in the service manual. If your dealer scanned your engine during the 100 hour service (as they should), they should have detected if there was a DTC stored in your engine computer.

You can find online copies of the installation/operation manual for the 6YC display that details the calibration process. The short version is that calibration requires having an empty fuel tank. You could probably shortcut having to pump all of the fuel out by removing the sending unit, but I'm not sure that's easily done in our boats given the limited space above the tank. I've never thought about how I would go about emptying our fuel tank on the trailer but two hours of shop time would seem reasonable to remove and replace the fuel. The single-point calibration process takes just a few seconds of button pushing on the display unit but getting the fuel out could be a PIA. If the tech did have enough room to easily pull the sending unit to calibrate it, two hours seems longer than necessary...but when working on my own boat, the time it takes to finish a job is usually at least twice as long as I thought it would take before I started!

I don't have any guesses on what would have caused you to lose calibration in the first place. I agree with Ivan; connectors and wiring are where I'd start if it happens again.

 

[Sweet_Pea]

Thanks for the explanation about the empty fuel tank. That makes sense. Our manuals are on the boat, but with the name for the display that you provided, we were able to locate the manual online and can see the deail there. Like you said, no info about error codes nor what might have caused the issue in the first place. Will monitor for now.