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Old 08-04-2015, 08:13 PM   #3
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Hmmm--- The engines appear to be an FL135 in that ithey're red, which all Lehman's that had the Lehman marination kit installed by Lehman were, and it has the chromed valve cover, which FL135s tend to have. I've had no direct experience with FL135s so I can't tell from the details if the engine is or isn't an FL135.

American Marine was the company that made Grand Banks boats until they more recently reorganized and changed the name to Grand Banks, Llc.

In the early 1970s American Marine decided they could save some money by buying the base engine for the FL120, the Ford Dorset, directly from Ford of England and buying the marinzation kit from Lehman and installing the kit themselves in Singapore right next to the boats the engines were going into. The resulting engine is identical to the FL120s that had their Lehman marinzation kits installed by Lehman in New Jersey.

But this idea proved not to be a cost saving after all, so after a few years American Marine went back to buying the already marinzed engines from Lehman.

FL120s that had the Lehman kit put on by American Marine next to the Grand Banks boat the engine(s) were going into were painted a metallic olive green or a sort of gold-yellow color. Our 1973 boat has a pair of these engines in it. They were originally the olive green until a previous owner painted them Alpine (Detroit) Green.

If American Marine installed Lehman FL135 marinization kits on the Ford Dover engine, the base engine for the FL135, I have never heard of this but that doesn't mean they didn't do it. American Marine was in and out of financial trouble for decades so perhaps they did put Lehman marninzation kits on Dover engines, paint them red and put on a chrome valve cover and sold them in Asia as FL135s as an agent for Lehman in New Jersey to make some extra income.

Ken is correct in that the Ford of England Dorset and Dover engines were marinized by a number of different companies around the world. Lehman is the best known, but they were not the only ones by any means. And there may have been another company called "American Marine" back then that did engine marinizations but was a totally separate entity from the American Marine that produced Grand Banks boats.
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