What smacking a boulder does to your lower unit gears

Today, I picked up my boat from a lower unit rebuild. I had hit some boulders just beneath the surface in a bone-headed maneuver that cost me $1070. From the sound it was making, I thought my entire engine was falling apart, but it was just the gears in the lower unit. I thought I'd post a picture of the gear for everyone's amusement and so you can say "Glad that wasn't me!" which is the opposite of "Sucks to be you!".

Enjoy and Safe Boating!

About ten years ago, I had a pinion gear in my lower unit come apart like that from running the SS prop into a gravel bar in a river while going about 20 - 25 mph. Didn't really do anything to the prop other than a few dings. Good thing I had the trolling motor battery charged up - we were just out going for a boat ride... An aluminum prop may have saved the lower unit. That was the beginning of the end for that 40hp Mariner.

How fast were you running when you hit those rock's ouch.What did the prop look like, I had differential gears look like that in my truck cost me 1000$ buck's also.

makes wrecking a prob look cheap 1 little ?? did you have a SS prop ive been told this is the disadvantage to running SS where the aluminum prop should give out before the lower unit gears.

I have to say, seeing the picture doesn't do the damage done justice. Those four teeth were chewed down to nothing. It's not as obvious in the picture as looking at it in person.

I guess if there is a moral to this, it's that lower unit damage can sound a LOT like power head damage. The initial prognosis was that I had powerhead damage, likely a broken crankshaft. But once it was inspected, it turned out to be lower unit damage. The explanation being that because of the physical connections between the power head and the lower unit, when running it, the sound resonates up to the power head which is sticking up out of the water and therefore where you hear the noise coming from.

It's all been interesting and I'm glad it's over.