Bravo 3 dumping oil into the water... help :(

[Jmangus22]

Not a searay, but I follow this forum and hope someone can advise...and since we have the same drives/motors just thought I'd go somewhere else to see what you have to say.. Have a 28 rinker where something happened this morning while raising the drive and it dumped ALL of the reserve tank into the water within 30 mins..

Real problem is I have no way to pull this out easily... the drive is a brand new of 2 months sea core drive.

Questions:
- anyone have this happen before?
- can we assume that the drive is now full of water?

This may be my exit from boating.

Thank you for any help.. I'm pretty heart broken over here!

 

[Bt Doctur]

either te oil line parted or the plastic nipple broke on the transom fitting. If you didnt run the drive you should be good . If you ran it you warmed the oil and it expanded, once cooled it can suck in some water but its not a disaster

 

[Henry Boyd]

Wait, you say while raising the drive it emptied the expansion bottle over 30 minutes. What were you doing during the 30 minutes? Did you actually see oil on the water, or are you assuming that because there is no oil in bottle and no oil in bilge?

Oil leaking out into water is the logical first conclusion suggesting the prop shaft seal, or a crack in housing. But it can also be the top drive shaft seal and the oil is trapped in the bellows.

 

[89P270]

Not sure if you figured out the issue or not. But, FWIW, I had a 2002 Rinker 342 fiesta Vee (sold this year and bought my mid-90's 270DA). I had the marina mechanic service both my Bravo III outdrives in the spring and return the boat to me. I let the boat set for a month before I took out. When I went to run the boat a month later, it drained almost all the outdrive gear oil from the reservoir on a short 15 minute run. The alarm sounded so I stopped and added more gear oil and limped back to the marina. Turns out these Bravo III drives have a transom fitting for the gear oil that if the services Tech doesn't pay attention, can get pinched or not seated properly. In my case was not properly seated. And, of course, they "fixed the issue" without telling me. A year later, doing research for swapping out two new Bravo drives I saw this issue surface on numerous websites - Particularly the Rinker Vanilla Forum website. Unfortunately, if this is your issue too, your drives will have to be pulled to diagnose. Not a difficult or time consuming activity but the boat needs to be hauled too. Hope this helps.