R DAVIS wrote:Hook up the meter temporarily to a spark plug wire on one of your vehicles, and leave it attached until it reflects the hours on your outboard engine.
My outboard engine has about 700-hours. Using the method suggested above to pre-calibrate the spark-ignition-sensing hour-meter, I will have to drive my car for 700-hours to match the outboard engine hours before I can install the hour-meter on the boat engine.
If my car's average speed were 30-MPH then 700-hours means I will need to drive 21,000-miles. I only drive about 10,000-miles a year, so I will need stop using my boat for about two-years while I used the suggested method to get the cheap hour meter to turn up the necessary 700-hours so I could transfer it to my boat engine.
The typical cost of driving the car 21,000-miles is about $0.50-per-mile, so I will need to invest $10,500 into the car driving to calibrate the hour meter.
The cost of this method seems a bit steep. I think I would just buy the OEM engine instrumentation. In addition to getting the engine hours, the OEM engine instrumentation would provide all sorts of other data from the engine in real time and onward into the future with no added costs and no car driving necessary.
Paulo wrote:The Hardline Products HR-8063-2 Hour Meter sounds like the way to go.
Perhaps, but I recommend you give some thought to the cost of running up the hours using your vehicle to pre-calibrate the hour-meter gizmo once you find out how many hours the boat engine has accumulated. You could also just post a label near the hour-meter that said, "Add
nnn hours to get actual hours."
Or, even simpler, estimate the engine hours by assuming 50-hours-per-year. That should get you close to the actual figure.