CAT 3208 / 435 TA's hours how many is to many hours on a 14 year old boat?

Northern lights generators are great generators and should go 10,000 hours, taken care of.

The Cat's, are you sure they haven't been rebuilt before? I would think 5,000 hours would be the 435hp lifespan, less in something where they're run hard at cruise all of the time. BUT, being a trawler they probably were hardly run at cruise......If they run good and are maintained you might get 10,000 hours out of them in that boat. The upside is that they're cheap to rebuild in comparison.

I wouldn't think those engines have a whole lot left in them. I don't know that I have ever seen one wear out. They usually overheat and burn the pistons up. Those engines were strained at 375 HP.

That is a lot of hours on 435 TAs. As said above I would guess they were either run easy and well maintained or they have been rebuilt. I guess if they were run easy and maintained they could go thousands of hours as the 435 version is a more robust engine then the lower horsepower 3208s, and assuming the operator was running them so as to generate very low horsepower they could go a long time. I would worry a bit about the turbos etc loading up if they aren't brought up in RPM to more that 2000 RPM for several minutes every few hours.

They usually fail due to cooling system failure and they are not tolerant of overheating. The most common failure are the aftercoolers. These need to be inspected every 500 hours or so and the entire sea water cooling system acid flushed or removed and cleaned on a regular basis as well as maintaining the closed coolant system.

If I remember correctly, the factory manual says MOH at 30,000 gallons, but that number no doubt is based on assumptions of how these e rated engines were run. They are not expensive to rebuild. $10K for a factory reman short block and pair of heads.

I agree it's almost critical to clean all of the heat exchangers every 2 years if you're putting a normal amount of hours on them.

Who really keeps a fuel log on a boat like that? I don't keep them, except for certain trips where I want to monitor fuel efficiency.

How do they run? What kind of maintanence was done? Does it look like they've been well maintained? At that age they're either well maintained or the engines are rust buckets visually. What does the exhaust look like at cold startup, that is the most tell tale sign of the condition with 3208's and the exhaust note.......do they smoke a lot of blue smoke and fuel out the exhaust when they're cold? Have the fuel nozzles and injector pumps been done? A lot of times those old engines will surprise you.

I've seen a Cummins 555 go 32,000 hours in a lobster boat and was still going without a rebuild, heads were rebuilt 5 times and turbo was done 6 times, but never the bottom end. I also saw another 555 go 8500 hours and still running strong (naturals). I've seen a 3208 with 18,000 hours with the heads never off in a trawler before, but was a natural.