Like I said in my previous post, my skeg was worn down from running in sand and mud. But I figure this might be helpful to anyone who has broken off their skeg, how to re-build it.
Here's a few pics showing how I did the repair.
Repair completed, showing the wear plate on the bottom.
Here's one, showing just how worn out the old skeg was, This little piece I'm holding in my hand is what I cut off with a circular saw.
That dredging is tough on a lower unit! The upside is that at least I have water at my dock on an average low tide!
A couple more, showing the wear plate welded to the bottom of the skeg.
As mentioned, this wear plate acts like an indicator, to keep from wearing down the skeg without realizing it. Typically, as you wear down a skeg, the prop wears, too, so, you don't really notice how worn the skeg is until you go to put a new prop on. That skeg is very important in protecting the prop from impact, without the skeg extending below the prop blades, if you hit an underwater object, you'll most likely cause damage or bending of the prop.
With the wear indicator, as soon as you see that 1/4 flat aluminum getting really thin, remove it, and weld a new one on, and you'll pretty much never wear out the skeg, as long as you keep replacing that wear plate.
Every OBM I've ever owned, I've worn the skeg down, and rebuilt it like this, and installed the wear plate. Really I should have learned by now to just go ahead and weld the **** thing on while the engine is new and the skeg is in good shape, instead of waiting to wear it down and having to rebuild it.
Only drawback to the wear plate is that it has to be welded (at least the way I do it) I'm sure someone could figure out a way to make one that would bolt on. In either case, if you operate in a lot of sand, I highly recommend installing something like this.
