Drive Saver: Yay or Nay

Tom.B said:

No, but the tech said that the engine's alignment would not make the shaft act the way it is.

I have video of the before re centered wobble that I will post once I get an after video.

Click to expand...

Again I'm not sure why this guy would say that a misaligned engine wouldn't make a shaft wobble. Whenever a shaft wobbles...usually the first thing a mech does is a feeler guage alignmet check. If you don't get a consistent "out" then you start looking at shafts, flanges and coupling issues.

I'm with Brooksie on this except Drivesavers will not correct a lot of misalignment.

Also with Jay as I posted before...put in a blank if it's cheaper than a new drivesaver or shaft (assuming shaft is OK).

Why fabricate a spacer to put in place of a drive saver? When I took them out of our boat for a season, I simply pulled the shaft forward the inch and a half and bolted up the original flanges. I'm quite sure the shaft savers were added by a previous owner with no mods to the shafts. Need to make sure the shaft surface is clean where it pulls into the cutless bearings, of course.

And there is room for a shaft zinc...if you want one...

I have Drive savers and they do fail. This one failed From shifting (I was in a boat parade and in and out of gear continuously trying to maintain station and position relative to the fleet.

When I talked with the company (Globe) that manufactures them, they advised me that drive savers have (in their opinion) limited service life and should be replaced periodically (I think it was 3-5 years if I remember correctly). This one was installed by the PO of the boat, so I didn't know how long it had been in service. I wound up replacing the shaft, because it was thrown on an eccentric and as you can see, the failure wasn't complete although it probably only turned a couple of revolutions before I shut everything down. It did get my attention!

I decided to go ahead and replace them on both engines after this failure because I think it does help somewhat with dampening vibration, and out of concern now for transiting the PNW coast with all the Japanese Tsunami debris - some of it big stuff - now beginning to show up.

Globe, by the way, provided excellent customer service so I was back in service very quickly.