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I have a 106 lower unit that was less than a year old and the Forward shiftting dog failed, the teeth broke off and needless to say it also dinged up the rest of the gears and bearings. My unit was not covered under warranty because it was 4 months pass the original purchased unit (3 Yrs 4 Months) from SEI. The first unit (about 2 1/2 years of trouble free service) was replaced with no problem I hit something underwater. Not complaining about the warranty, my gripe is that the shifting dog/gear failed in less than a year on this new unit. I had a Mercruiser Mechanic (over 30 years experience) rebuild the unit and he said he has never seen that gear fail like this one. Luckily, I kept the original Alpha One drive with a cracked case near the prop shaft and the mechanic was able to cannibalize the internals into the SEI unit. The linkage was not out of adjustment, same mechanic adjusted the cables less than a month prior to the failure. The reason for the adjustment, the plastic cable keeper on the Morse shifter snapped in two when I was in my slip. I did the initial adjustment when I got the shifter part in and the mechanic fine tuned the shifting, making sure forward and reverse were locking. I went approx. 100 miles since the adjustment and fail gear failure. Any suggestions why this gear failed so soon? I'm thinking my unit had a defective gear (not hardened properly). Hope others are not having the same problem with this unit.
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I am sorry you experienced a problem with your replacement lower unit. We do have a 3 year fault free warranty, which worked out great for you since you did have an impact on your first unit and we covered that with no problem. Since the warranty starts from the date of original purchase, your foreward gear clutch teeth failure was 4 months beyond the 3 years.
Some things that could cause a clutch failure would be a high idle, shifting slowly into gear, misadjustment or a bad shift cut out switch. I doubt that the gear would have any hardness issue. If you want to send the gear into us, I will have it hardness tested.
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Next time I talk to the Mechanic I will see if he still has the gear and see about sending it to you. All of the issues you mention were checked. Of course I had to hear it from the Mechanic, that he doesn't believe in aftermarket parts and he believes the Mercruiser parts are the best. Personally, I'm a believer in aftermarket parts and your outdrives. Many times the aftermarket company is the OEM. If this rebuilt unit gets destroyed I will be buying another SEI unit.Comment
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