Some scary musings, zombie viruses, and in the “holy cream cheese WTF!?!?” department…
Some days the whole consumerist mindset around sailing and cruising makes my brain hurt. Everything is just silly-expensive, people complain about prices, and yet they refuse to think and do something about it.
For instance, that 30-year old Yamaha 3HP I’ve been fixing needed a couple of parts and buying said parts from Yamaha is a pain. Party because they were too fucking expensive and could only be found in Japan which entailed overly expensive shipping and time issues.
I expect you know the drill…
One part that really caught my attention was a 4mm metric bolt which was priced at $4.95. The shipping would have been something like $19 frelling dollars and taken a couple of months to get to me.
So the choice was to get the Yamaha bolt or go to the local ACE hardware and pay them what I consider to be a very over-priced bolt at less than a dollar.
Only a stupid idiot would use non-Yamaha parts!
Or, so the folks on an outboard repair forum I sometimes check out say.
Maybe it’s just me but really?
Sadly, sometimes you just have to do the math and use some common sense.
I once bought non VW stretch bolts when replacing a cylinder head gasket, much to the horror to anyone who was trying to sell me original bolts. I did 20k miles on the “they will never work” bolts before selling it. True, not all bolts are created equal, but that is what torque wrenches are for.