Hello, John Talley here with boats.net. Today i'm going to walk you through the
process to swap out our prop shaft seals on our Mercury Tracker 40. Not that
tough to do, let me show you the parts I'm going to
use to do this and we'll dive into it. All right guys, not to scare you but what
I've decided to do is order an entire seal kit, because there are
several different videos that we're going to do and this kit
really addresses every single seal and gasket that's associated with this
particular lower unit. If you want to be sure that yours is ready
to go for the whole season, go ahead and order this kit
and do the whole thing. And if you need help doing that, if you would,
reference this particular unit's playlist and I can walk you through
each procedure. So whether or not you've just got a couple of parts or the whole
kit, let's open up the toolbox and dive into
this.
Let's start off by draining the fluid out of it.
We won't make quite such a mess.
It's just about finished draining. Let's go ahead and start pulling it apart,
and the housing is just held in place by two
13 millimeter half inch bolts: one at the top, one on the bottom.
So the next step is to actually pull this housing out, and it's going to be in
there fairly strong, so you're going to need a decent puller. There's a couple of
different ones out there, the slide hammers. You just need to make
sure whatever you're using has fingers that can actually wrap around
right there in two locations to pull it out.
I'm actually using one from Yamaha made for some of their smaller displacement
outboards. Works pretty well. That's a little
unnerving. Never a good sign when you open up a housing and
a piece of metal falls into the drain tray.
I don't see any missing teeth.
Because now is when you need to check out the bearings, make sure they're still
good to go. If they're, if you feel any
crunchiness, you've got a problem in there but these,
these feel really good. All the needles are still in place on
that one. So all we're going to replace is just
the o-ring and this inner and outer seal right at
the output shaft. And when you're doing this, don't go into
the housing and gouge it. If so, then you're going to
create a potential leak. So we want to go in and pull back just a
little bit, and then pry in. Alright let's get a
little bit bigger screwdriver in here.
There's one. Grab the other one.
Woohoo, fun stuff. Now we do want to clean this out a
little bit. And you also want to make sure that there's
not any any corrosion going down, because if it's got a bunch of corrosion,
that means it's not going to seal up right,
and that's the name of the game here. But this has been a fresh water motor from
what I can tell, so it's not really going to be an issue.
But if you've been running yours in salt, you really need to pay attention to that.
So the way these go back in: small one goes in first like
this, and then that will be resting above it.
Aluminum drivers, and we're looking for one
that of course will fit on the inside like this, but not so far that it's
pushing in on here. We want to push out to that outer edge just as much as
possible without going past it. And that 32 millimeter I think is going
to do the trick. Now you want to make sure that you're
using a piece of wood against this gear, because they're very hard
and that also makes them very brittle and easy to damage.
We're going to put a little bit of thread locker
on our seal, and yes I realize it's not a thread.
But one of the properties of thread lockers
is also a sealant, and they're actually, I think the right word is
anaerobic. They don't really activate except
in the absence of air. So once you drive it in,
that's when it starts to do what it needs to do.
The trick is here to get it to go in
square.
If you sense that it's going in a little cattywompus, angle it
to where to line it back up right.
Alright, one down, one to go. Let's get this one started out here.
That should be it. Now when you're replacing the o-ring,
inspect the groove. Make sure there's no corrosion in there.
That's typically one of the places it occurs.
We're going to take a little bit of grease,
fill that groove back in. Don't really have to fill it in, just want a light
coating of it in there.
Get our new
o-ring in place, a little bit more grease on it. And last
but not least, we want to pack the area in between our
two seals with grease.
So let's go and get our prop shaft installed, and get that housing
bolted up, and then we'll pretty much be done.
Let's go.
Next, let's prep our bolts with some red thread locker.
You don't have to be carried away, just a little bit on the tip
will be all that is required. And then we're going to torque these to
18 foot-pounds. I'm actually off a little bit on the
alignment, so let's tap this over. There we go.
Alright guys, that's pretty much going to wrap this one up. The only thing you
have left to do is of course remount your prop and then
refill the lower unit gear lube. Now if you need help doing that, I want
you to reference the playlist for this particular unit
and I can walk you through. Listen, if you need these parts or any other parts for
your boat, why don't you come see us at boats.net
and we can get you taken care of. If you have any questions or comments,
leave them in the section below and I'll do my best to answer them. And hey,
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We just want to say thank you for shopping here with us at boats.net, and
we will see you in the next video. Y'all have a great day.