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Originally Posted by Waterbaby
Thanks IG - I was astounded to read about the bellows........ makes me wonder how many marinas (including my own), when de-winterizing our boats, check the bellows? I was also surprised to see the drainplug not being inserted so far down on the list..... fortunately that's never happened to me, only because I know so many people it has happened to that I'm always very cautious about it -- check it every time before Bear hits the water!!!!!!!!
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Mine went this summer (drive bellows - the Merc Alpha I has 3 of them, the drive bellows, one for the exhaust and one for the shift cable). A steady stream of lake water was pouring into the bilge which I heard as a trickle (like a faucet left on). This was on a Saturday morning and the leak must have happened sometime during the prior week. The flow was only moderate and luckily the bilge pump had been keeping up. I had to make immediate arrangements to get the boat out of the water.
The bellows was the original on a 9 year old boat and it failed without warning. These bellows are in very tight spaces and it is pretty much impossible to inspect them thoroughly to the degree that you could say with certainty that they'll make it another season. A quick peek and maybe a poke to feel if the rubber is 'punky' is all a marina or DIYer is really going to be able to do (which I had done last spring about 6 weeks before mine failed).
The bellow system is a real disadvantage in an I/O compared to an outboard as that piece of rubber is all that is keeping the lake
outside your boat... the only safe play is to periodically replace the 3 bellows on a schedule you're comfortable with. Around every 5 years will do it (a marina charged me $500 for the job). My boat was out of service for half the summer because of this - no such thing as same day marina service in July - so I paid in lost enjoyment for trying to stretch out the bellows replacement on my boat. it could have been worse - if I had been gone 2 weeks instead of 1, i could have found a submarine when I got back to the lake....