2000 Ficht

[Smitty]

Does anyone have any personal experience with the 2000 Ficht motors (specifically 135-150HP) to indicate that OMC has gotten the bugs out of them?
This includes powerhead problems, areas of the rpm range being rough, etc.

PS Before anyone jumps in (good or bad) about their '98 and '99 models, this is not a consideration on my part. Dealer last week told me out of 33 total Ficht motors they sold in '98 & '99, ONLY 6 or 7 came back with blown powerheads with a couple coming back twice. That's about 5 or 6 too many for my liking considering I already am limited in the # of fishing trips I take a year and the thought of having a 20% chance that it could go in the middle of one & leave me high and dry.

Thanks

[steves]

Smitty,
I went through through this same decision process about 3 months ago. I was well aware of the problems with the 98 and 99's but really wanted to go to the latest DFI technology pending they had worked out all of their bugs. I did countless hours of research trying to gather if their was any inkling of problems with the 2000 models. I received many responces from numerous chat sites where the respondents were Fishing Pro's, Guides, Charter Captains etc...I never received any negative feedback from anyone that was running a model year 2000. many of the people responding had as many as 300+ hours already on their motors. They have been running them since last May/June. My findings convinced me that OMC has appeared to have nailed this technology..Last fall I would have never imagined buying a ficht, and was dead set on buying the Yamaha HPDI. But, there late entry into this DFI market opened the door for me to do this in depth research and utimately convinced me that the Ficht was going to be reliable..Time will utimately tell....Steve

[aar7]

Only 6 or 7 out of 33 . . . yikes, that's better than 18%! I don't have any personal experience with FICHTs but I know several people who have them. Those that don't have problems love the motor . . . . unfortunately too many of them have had repeated problems. A recent walleye tournament here out West saw 5 Fichts go bad during the tournament. There were 55 boats in the tournament and not all of them were running Fichts (don't know how many were). Several of the ones that went bad were year 2000 motors. I also know a dealer who can't get two brand new Fichts to run.

I would be careful on this one. Even if you can get one of the ones that runs great, what's the resale going to be like??