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Old 01-17-2013, 07:40 PM   #53
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
All Ford Lehman 120s were red when shipped from Lehman in New Jersey. I'm not sure what color the FL135s were when shipped but I believe they all had a chromed rocker box cover.

There is one exception I know of to the Lehmans-are-red rule. After several years of buying marninzed FL120s directly from Lehman, American Marine building its Grand Banks boats in Singapore decided in the early 1970s that they could save money by buying the Ford of England Dorset diesel directly from Ford in the UK, then buy the Lehman marinization kit from Lehman in New Jersey, and install the marinization kit on the engine(s) on the factory floor in Singapore next to the boat it or they were going into.

Since they had to paint the engines themselves they chose two colors to use. One was a slightly metallic olive green and the other was a sort of yellow-gold. I have seen examples of both and the olive green was actually quite nice. (see photo).

After a few years of doing this they determined that it was actually costing them more to put the Lehman marinization kits on themselves than to simply buy the already-marinized engine from Lehman. So they went back to doing this and the engines in Grand Banks boats became red again.

The FL120s that had the marinization kits installed in Singapore are virtually identical to the FL120s that had the kits installed by Lehman themselves other than the paint color.

The engines in our 1973 GB were originally the olive green as shown in the photo (which is not our boat). This is evidenced by the paint on the engine mount supports and other out of the way spots on the engine. But at some point and for some reason a previous owner decided he didn't like the olive color or it was starting to look bad, and so had both engine repainted in place with Alpine (Detroit) Green. Which I actually quite like.

But if the engines in our boat looked like the one in the photo I wouldn't mind it. I do not care for American Marine's yellow-gold color at all.
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FL120 Olive Green.jpg  
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