RCE wrote:
..

According to him, 6000 hours on these engines has just about broken them in.
Most problems are associated with the bolt-ons.


RCE

These engines can run 10's of thousands of hours in applications like
24/7 power generators, and 6000 hours wouldn't be unusual for a
commercial fish boat. Due to the differeneces in frequency of
operation, long down times with dirty oil festering in the crankcase,
etc etc etc it would be really unusual to realize a commercial duty
longevity in a pleasure boat application.

Just because some people will live to be 105 doesn't mean that every 75
year old should absolutely count on doing so. :-)

In the case of this DeFever, the price is depressed in part due to a
perceived "risk" of a 6000 hour boat. Buyers are going to be skeptical,
and rightly so. All the people who say, "Don't worry, she's got years
and years and years left in her" will do nothing more then express
surprise when something does break loose and it is the new owner who
will be footing the entire bill. Let's say nothing major went wrong,
jps ran the boat for 10 years and then decided to sell a 38 year old
boat with 7400 engine hours.........good luck!

The good news with this boat is that if it's available for $75k, $80k,
or even up to the $100k
asking price there's a potential (depending on the condition of other
systems and cosmetics) for the value to increase by about as much as it
would take to repower. Most of the time a buyer going into a boat that
needs to be repowered doesn't expect that to be the case and only
discovers after it's too late that he needs to spend another big pile
of dough.
My impression is that the market has discounted this boat for
something- and the most obvious suspect without an inspection has to be
the engine hours. The boat may not be sale-proof at $100k, but up in
the middle huns where you find boats of similar age with half the
engine hours it probably is. We can be pretty sure the seller didn't
start off at $100k, and that the current pricing is the latest step in
a series of measures (that included moving the boat from FLA to the PAC
NW?) to try to find the "spot" in the marketplace where the perceived
value at least slightly exceeds the price demanded and it becomes more
likely that a buyer will appear.