Yamaha Maintenance Intervals During Frequent Operation

[Pontooner]

First post here. I'm a Ranger Tug Dreamer, you might say. We have plans to do the Loop at some point, maybe a decade from now. We currently have a triple pontoon on the lake with a 150 Yamaha, which is, incredibly, an excellent skiing and tubing family boat, in addition to its traditional role as party barge/swim platform/cruiser.

Anyway, I've been following Ranger tugs for a while, walked all around them at a couple boat shows, and seeing as how good the 150 Yamaha is on my pontoon boat, I know I would feel much more confident with the R27 OB than I would buying a diesel engine.

So here's my question that I've been wondering. Yamaha's maintenance schedule calls for an upper and lower oil change every 100 hours, or once a year. We use our boat A LOT, but even for us, it's difficult to get a full hundred hours on the engine in a season, in no small part because we spend a lot of time anchored and swimming. But I was thinking if you're doing the Loop, you could hit 100 hours every 20 days. Do you really have to get service that frequently under those operating conditions, or would you stretch it out a bit since the time interval is a lot shorter? (It's not a deal-breaker either way.)

 

[Brian B]

Scheduled maintenance items should be performed according to the owner's manual, failure to do so could void any warranty. If you have to pay to have the boat hauled to do lower unit oil changes that will become very costly doing the loop with an outboard. Ranger Tugs is now using the Suzuki outboard. (search Suzuki on this site).

 

[JamesTXSD]

After we were beyond 800 hours on the Honda on our C-Dory, our Honda dealer said we could confidently go longer between oil changes, since we were using the boat so much. He suggested 200 hours, and that worked fine for us. If you are shuttling the trailer, it is a snap to pull out and do the oil and lower unit lube. When that wasn't the case, we would call ahead and schedule a haul out and an hour's labor to take care of the oil change. You can use an oil extractor to pull out the old engine oil when on the water, and skip the filter change until the next oil change cycle.

Where we live, there are commercial operators who go far beyond 200 hours on oil changes, since the boats are in service daily.