Wrote this e-mail May 2010 in response to a Seawind owner's inquiry, but I
never finished/forwarded it to anyone. Hope it helps.
We just finished (May 2010) replacing our 9.9s with new T9.9 GPXR motors. In
Yamaha speak this stands for Model G, Power tilt, eXtra long shaft, Remote
control.
I think the best choice of motors is the GEXR but as of January 2010 that motor
was not available in the US, and we needed to get something shipped to Panama
where we were doing the work. Yamaha told us that the GPXR would work just as
well since it was not necessary to use the power tilt function. Try to get the
GEXR, it will make life much more simple.
The GPXR presented two problems for us. First, the transom mount bracket on
the GPXR extends much further down on the rear side of the mount (18 inches?).
Because of this the motor would not fit into the splash guard cowling. One
choice was to cut out part of the cowling, but since I HATE cutting the boat I
chose to raise the motor mount about 2". Worked fine on the starboard side,
but I found out later that the two cowlings (port and starboard) were not the
same size. Had to raise the mount a little more on the port side. Now I am
getting a little too much cavitation on the port side and will have to go back
to Plan A (cutting the cowling) so I can lower the engine a little. Raising the
mount was easily done by cutting two new mounting boards. The old ones were
failing anyway. A bonus was that when I removed the old boards on the
starboard side I found a broken weld in the swing mount so I repaired that
also. (Of course I was doing all of
this in Spanish, in a remote location, and with a rusty screwdriver and some
wrenches for tools so it took a while).
The second problem was the wiring harness. The old engines had a 7 pin wiring
harness (and I assume the GEXR has a 7 pin also), but the GPXR had a 10 pin
harness. The 3 extra pins are related to the Power TIlt function. I spent a
lot of time looking at solutions to this problem before I bought a two 6' long
10 pin extensions available from Yamaha. I used the new extension to make a
good, dry connection to the motor pigtail (10 pin) in the motor well and ran
the extension to the interior of the boat. I then cut the old 7 pin coming from
the ignition switch and the new 10 pin extension coming from the motor and
married them in a dry location (splice was in hanging locker stbd and in head
locker port). I simply matched wire colors and left the 3 unused wires
hanging. It does work, but it took me a while to get up the nerve to try it.
The 10 pin extension was needed only because I didn't want to do the splice in
the motor well.
Gist of the story. If the GEXR is available it will save you time and $$. If
the GPXR is all you can get the job can still be done. New motors run great.
If you have any questions e-mail me at tom_mccarthy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
