The Boating Forum - Cummins QSD4.2????

I have noticed that a few more boat makers(like Fountain and Albemarle) are starting to use more of this engine in their standard offerings. I was wondering if anyone has firsthand experience with operating/owning this engine and what you thoughts are.
Not to be rude,but before I get the usual "canned" responses, yes I know about BoatDiesel(I am covering different terriroty and want as many owner comments as I can find) and yes I know about the history of the engine and what it is, with respect to Cummins.....Mercruiser.......VM Motori............

Spoke with my cummins rep this week. They admitted there are not sufficient parts in the us to service this motor or the fuel rail system. I have had a few customers with larger express offerings that have chosen these motors and they have been a bear to work on, getting the parts is the battle, everything has to come from across the pond.

POST that sound like a huge problem. A friend of mine has a Volvo D4210, and everytime he needs parts they have to come from Sweden, and warrenty will only pay for standard shipping 5-7 days, so he shells out hundereds of bucks getting his warranty parts in 2 days airfreight.

Post50 - 8/27/2008 5:14 AM

Spoke with my cummins rep this week. They admitted there are not sufficient parts in the us to service this motor or the fuel rail system. I have had a few customers with larger express offerings that have chosen these motors and they have been a bear to work on, getting the parts is the battle, everything has to come from across the pond.

Post,

The parts acquisition issue aside, what do you think about this engine with respect to the design, reliability, performance etc.......................

We have a 220hp mechanically injected version of this engine (approx 10 years old). I don't believe that the engine itself has changed much with the added common rail injection, but haven't had a real good look over one yet to be sure.
We had a problem with an overheat due to a belt breakage and had to replace the head gaskets. Whilst we were doing this we identified a couple of what we thought were weak points in the design. The main one was the small 'zig-zag' shaped oil line that runs across the top of the heads. It is mild steel and because of where it is placed very prone to corrosion if the top of the engine gets wet. Ours in fact had a pinhole in it and was just starting to weep some oil, but was so hidden that you would probably not notice it (or find it) until it became quite serious. The other thing to note is that changing the head gaskets on this engine is about as hard as it gets on any engine that I have seen. Six seperate heads that all need to be hardness tested and then a relatively complex reassembly process. I have had a couple of experienced marine engineers comment that this is the worst aspect of this engine.
Overall I think that the engine is actually not too bad, but has a few weaknesses that I now know to be careful of. Note that I think that the newer engines have an improved drive belt setup which I would say is a good move. Parts are not cheap, but what marine diesel parts are?

I am the world's most suffering QSD 4.2 owner. I wound up having one of the first two of these engines installed in my 38 Fountain SFC last June 2007. These were not the engines I had ordered but in mid-build Fountain was told this was the engine that Cummins Mercruiser was now selling in the States. Here are a few things I learned the hard way. First, these engines are not Cummins engines -- they are VM Motori engines with a Cummins label. Nowhere will you find this info. on any CMD brochures or sales literature. What this meant for me last season is that when things starting going wrong -- which they did almost immediately -- Cummins had no idea how to service these engines, no training on the engines, no diagnostic equipment, and no parts or even the ability to order the parts. What a complete outrageous disaster. My first problem surfaced when my wife and I and our two small kids were running in the ocean from Martha's Vineyard to East Hampton. Just past Block Island, my starboard engine alarm sounded and I stopped and opened the engine hatch to see hot diesel shooting all over my hot engines and filling the bilge. Turned out that the high pressure fuel line burst. After getting towed in to Mystic, having a welder weld a bead on the fuel line, and having it fail before I got back to homeport in Mamaroneck, I then found out that Cummins service was competely at a loss on what to do. They couldn't order parts because their parts department didn't even have any info. or ability to order parts for these new engines because the codes weren't even in their system. They didn't know how long it would take to figure this out. So I contacted CMD directly communicating with the fellow who wrote the press release for the new engine. He hooked me up with a customer service engineer who informed me that these were VM Motori engines and they had no parts in this country. I made them air ship the part from Italy and after losing Labor Day weekend, the part was installed. A few days later, I went out and heard the alarm go off again. This time when I looked under the hatch I saw a clear liquid shooting out all over the starboard engine. This time a raw water plug had corroded within the first month. The mechanic fixed this and I thought I was good to go. Next up, the turbo waste gate on my port engine failed. Then I kept sounding the alarm when I throttled up. Cummins couldn't figure out this problem until CMD lent them a laptop with the diagnostic software which the biggest Cummins distributor in the country didn't have. A high pressure fuel sensor was going off. This kept happening because the ECM was bad which we eventually figured out. That was it for last season. This season, at the beginning, I found out that the starboard turbo had frozen because of seawater intrustion. This was all too much for me, and because I am a lawyer, CMD replaced the starboard engine in May. The port turbo was also replaced as a precaution. All of this was rather traumatic for me as all I wanted to do was enjoy my dreamboat. Fortunately, after much cajoling, CMD ate all the costs of these repairs, but it wasn't easy. Bottom line, CMD should never have sold these engines in the US before setting up the proper service infrastructure and without disclosing to customers that these are really VM Motori engines with a Cummins label. This season, the engines have performed for the most part, with an occasional false fuel pressure sensor warning. When they work, these engines are quite impressive -- with terrific fuel efficiency (up to 3 mpg at nearly 40 mph). I still lack confidence in their durability and reliablity. And that is the reason I bought Cummins engines in the first place. Time will tell but I bought these engines to fish the northeast canyons and even though I have 100 hours on the new engine, I'm afraid to make that run yet.