BA Marine Services

Money focused, not client / efficiency / productivity focused as claimed – I recently had BA Marine Services (BAMS) out to work on an Alpha One Gen II stern drive which required new seals and that I’d already removed from the boat. Firstly, to negate wear, I offered to make a spacing washer (alloy, rubber or polycarbonate) to space 2 of the seals onto fresh sections on the drive shaft. BAMS decided an o-ring would do the job, but once pressed into place, the seal was deformed, so it needed to be carefully removed to avoid damaging it, then re-seated in the original position. Meanwhile, I polished the shaft to ensure the best possible seal. However, that whole process was unproductive, whereas the offered flat spacing washer would have produced a much better end result. Experience should have told him an o-ring wouldn’t work.

BAMS replaced the other seals in the upper gear case and reassembled it (with my assistance) then assembled the whole leg unit. To access the seal on the prop shaft, and without a suitable stand, BAMS's process was to remount the leg to the transom to undo the nut. However, the leg would not slide in due to the yoke not aligning with the engine coupling. Several attempts were made with my assistance, and between fitting attempts, BAMS smacked his alignment tool repeatedly in all directions, but to no avail. So, he decided to remove the upper drive shaft again (with my assistance), then refit the leg to the transom negating any alignment issue. However, he still failed to crack the nut to access the seal. So, the leg was removed and the upper drive shaft refitted. Again, significant time was spent on a completely non-productive process.

BAMS returned to trying to refit the leg to the transom. More struggling and bashing. At one stage, he questioned if the alignment tool was inserting all the way. The solid “dong” when it seated, and the witness marks proved it had, but it still copped some solid belts. As the non-symmetrical witness marks proved, a lot more was required than fine-tuning the angle of the gimbal bearing. The engine needed realignment, and that is never going to be achieved by belting the alignment tool in all directions. At no stage did BAMS actually enter the boat and inspect or attempt to adjust the mounts. His only suggestion was that the coupling might be damaged.

He finally called it quits after 4 hours, most of which was pointless, but he still wanted payment for 4 hours’ work, and at a rate that seemed to ignore the advertised 15% discount. Not expecting it to be such a major job, I didn’t have enough cash, but paid him what I had and agreed to sort the rest when he came back to complete other work he’d identified, including the replacement of the drive shaft bellow.

Follow up:

I purchased some 1” pipe as an alignment tool. When inserted into the coupling, it touched the gimbal bearing at 10 o'clock, meaning the front of the engine needed to move to port and up. On further inspection, the engine mounts were shot beyond salvage, so new mounts were ordered.

In the meantime, BAMS called a couple of times to check when he could come back to complete work. On the second occasion, he asked for the balance of his payment. I said I was going to discuss that with him to assist with someone starting out in business …

Me: From a customer’s perspective, what you actually achieved was replacing the seals in the upper gear case. That’s about 1.5 hours’ work max. The rest of the time achieved nothing. For a start, if you are going to fit the leg to the transom to attempt to crack the prop shaft nut, and the upper drive shaft can be inserted last, why didn’t you leave that until last? Then you wouldn’t have had to remove and replace it twice.

BAMS: In my defense, I didn’t remove the leg so I didn’t know how tight it was to remove.

(Fact: Ease of removal is not necessarily an indication of alignment. Pulling the shaft out of a greased coupling when misaligned is a lot different from trying to insert it into a misaligned coupling. Insertion requires the alignment to be very precise. And as stated before, simply changing his order of assembly for which there is no disadvantage (being efficient) would have avoided any such issue.)

Me: A length of 1” pipe shows how out of alignment the engine is, so no amount of bashing was going to correct that.

BAMS: That’s how you diagnose the problem.

(Fact: The problem was diagnosed without the bashing. The witness marks on the alignment tool clearly showed an alignment issue. The next step should have been to adjust the engine mounts, but BAMS never went there. In fact, he skipped the obvious diagnosis and went straight to a misdiagnosis of “damaged coupling”.)

BAMS: I was there for 4 hours. I want to be paid for my 4 hours’ work, please.

Me: But a lot of that time was wasted and inefficient.

BAMS: It’s the same at a dealership. They still charge for time spent and mechanics still get paid for their time.

(Fact: Good dealerships charge for work completed, and to ensure they aren’t paying mechanics to be unproductive, they ensure they have all the necessary tools and equipment on hand. There are manufacturer-provided time guidelines for common service routines, and while the harsh marine environment can throw curve balls, proper training, experience and equipment limit inefficiency and any costs above the quoted figure would need prior customer approval. A workshop would not have paid him to aimlessly bash an alignment tool.)

He was paid.

With new engine mounts installed, the engine needed to be moved approximated 10mm to port and a similar distance up for my “expensive” alignment tool to centre in the gimbal bearing. (No amount of bashing was ever going to achieve that!) Once the engine was aligned, the leg was refitted in less than a minute, requiring one slight rotation of the yoke to align the splines and it just slipped in. No bashing necessary.

So, BAMS was paid for 4 hours of labour. That essentially included him charging me for my required assistance and the use of a couple of my tools. I could have dropped the leg to a repairer and had the same work completed for less than half what BAMS charged, carried on with my day instead of assisting, not had my torch covered in grease (BAMS's went flat) or my vice used. And since BAMS clearly could have worked more efficiently and hopefully has learned from this job how to be more efficient in the future, rather than class that as gaining experience, he expects to be paid full rates for learning on the job.

I’m still unsure why BAMS avoided the obvious and persisted with a failing strategy for so long. Inexperience perhaps. I assumed he was amusing himself / experimenting / challenging theories / being sociable / had nowhere better to be … but I certainly didn’t think I was being charged for nothing, just because he was still here. A cynical person might suggest that since his appointment later that day had cancelled, he thought he’d make some extra money here instead.

It’s a good gig when you expect to be paid just for breathing, not for being productive, but I don’t think it’s a sustainable business model.

It might be a different story with lighter and less complicated drive systems on outboards, but I certainly couldn’t recommend BA Marine Services to service stern drives.

Further Update:

After just 3 trips and less than 2 hours of running time, I discovered gear oil leaking from the water intake in the leg. Not good. I removed the leg again to discover the drive shaft bellow full of gear oil too. (See photos)

I took the leg to an authorised Mercruiser dealer this time. (My experience in dealing with trades over 40 years is that if they don't have the skills, experience, equipment or attitude to do the job right the first time, they're unlikely to ever sort it.)

I requested the leg seals be fully inspected and replaced as necessary ... again. Upon stripping the upper gear case, the experienced mechanic immediately noted that the "new" upper drive shaft seal was damaged (perhaps due to BAMS's violent insertion, removal, then re-insertion) and no seal would ever seal in the wear groove on the shaft. (BAMS obviously lacked the experience or care factor to determine it was pointless fitting a new seal, but his work for the day should have stopped once he'd removed the seal.) A new shaft was fitted, and seals replaced.

The mechanic then checked the alignment (no adjustment necessary since my alignment), refitted the leg to the boat, filled it with gear oil, topped up the engine oil, tightened a V-belt, generally gave the engine and ancillary attachments a check-over, then test ran the package for 20 minutes and again checked for leaks. Oh, and he checked the bellows as well and confirmed they were fine, so BAMS was just chasing more business when adamant the drive shaft bellow needed replacing urgently.

All that (much more service / accomplishment than BAMS achieved) involved 3.5 hour's labour and without BAMS's claimed double discounted rates (and his reliance on my tools and labour) cost just $25 more.

Of course, my costs on consumables (seals, oil, gaskets) were also duplicated, so giving BAMS a go effectively cost me $600 for nothing.