Gear Crunch

[Marco1]

I never owned a stern drive before my 180 Sport 4Cyl. I had a series of wooden shaft driven boats that had mechanical or hydraulic gearboxes that made no gear noise when operated.

In my 180 3L Alpha 1 - I notice that the gears give a distinctive and unnerving crunch when going into forward or reverse.

Is this normal?

 

[annie]

Totally normal.... the gears spin all the time, theres a dog clutch that engages the prop shaft to either fwd or reverse. Try to make your shift from neutral to fwd/reverse quite fast and you should only hear a couple of clunks... if you dilly dally it will clunk all day and eventually round off the edges of the dogs and then cost $$$$

B...break
O...out
A...another
T...thousand

 

[out-n-aboat]

All my i/o's I have ever owned made this noise. I would not worry to much about it.

 

[wish2fish]

I'm not sure if we should be giving advice on a noise just yet. Descriptions can be quite subjective but he really might have a crunch. Is that normal?

I would say i never heard a sound from my alpha. My bravo III on the other hand it quite different. If you don't shift quickly you get a clunking noise. would never call it a crunch.

my 2 cents

 

[Mark RSA2AU]

Mine crunches like a coffee grinder, then clunks into gear, especialy if I am slow. The quicker I get it into gear the better. I also find it is slightly worse with the Hi5 than the ali prop, probably due the the increased weight.

It is worse than my previous 200 merc outboard though.

Cheers

 

[Gunn]

What everyone else said. I was a bit unnerved about it at first, but became used to it (that's probably why some say they haven't heard it!). There's even some sort of interrupter near the shift cable on the engine (usually a little spring loaded roller bearing type thing usually near the top) that causes the engine to stall for a split second when shifting into gear to minimize this noise and any damage.

Make sure your idle speed is set to specs and not too high.

 

[Lazy Daze]

Yes. Just to reinforce what has been said above... ALWAYS shift very quickly into FWD or REV. A single, solid "clunk" is good (quick engagement). A "grinding" sound is bad (wearing your gears away). Cars/trucks would actually benefit by having the tranny shift quicker, as well. But, too many people would complain that "it's not smooth" so the companies build a soft (long) shift into the programming. Of course, cars also have either a clutch (manual or automatic). We don't have those - we simply have a gear set. So, the quicker you can get those gears meshed together, the better.

This is (upper gears) from not having drive lube, but it gives you a good visual:

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