Maybe your thinking of buying a jet ski, or maybe you’re just interested in the maintenance side of our business. It’s not all glamorous renting out jet skis, things do break…a lot. It’s definitely not just buying some jet skis, putting them in the water and collecting tons of cash (though that would be nice lol). It’s a lot of work, and maybe our experience will help you guys in making a decision on what to buy (because we put a lot of hours on our equipment, and there’s a clean winner as far as reliability goes).
What Are The Basics?
For every jet ski and jet kart there will be similar things you need to replace etc, some more than others. Every 50-100 hours you will need to replace the oil. With our Yamahas we have to use yamalube 4w, it’s super affordable and we love it. Alternatively our seadoos use a vastly more expensive oil from XPS that BRP prefers. Both do the job they are supposed to, and last a similar amount of time, just the seadoo oil is about twice the price per oil change.
In addition to this seadoos have coolant (I’ll keep links related to the sparks we have for our karts), the coolant doesn’t exactly expire, but leaks develop for various reasons, whether gaskets, the coolant bottle itself or something else fails. The Seadoo orange coolant is around $11 for 32oz, and we go through a bottle a week, even with staying on top of failing gaskets and replacing leaking parts etc (we keep all the gaskets etc on hand for this reason).
Lastly spark plugs need to be replaced every 50-100 hours as well, seadoos using CR8EB and Yamaha using CR9EB part number plugs. They are roughly the same price each and fairly each to replace.
What About The More Complex Issues?
The yamahas with basic maintenance will go forever. We have them at 850 hours and with basic maintenance they only need an impeller replaced every once in a while as well as bearings for the driveshaft. My main complaint is the ride motors for the reverse do fail which throws them into limp mode until it’s replaced, and the ride motors are very expensive ($1000+). Other than that, these have been a work horse that we can generally always rely on.
The seadoos on the other hand have been another story. We love our karts to death they are a blast! But they are not without faults. Other than having to always monitor the coolant because of the closed loop cooling system (this is minor), they have had other fun issues. The main one being the driveshaft stripping out the inside of the crank where it sits. On sparks 2016 and before this means the whole crankshaft needs to be replaced, but even on the ones after, a lot of work still needs to be done which requires the engine to be pulled out. Yamahas on the other hand buffer this issue so the torque doesn’t strip anything. We are currently dealing with this, but this repair will be over $1500 to fix the driveshaft and crankshaft.
Who’s Tech Is Better (how does this help with maintenance)?
This one I will have to give to the seadoos. The seadoos have GPS speedometers vs the little paddles on the back of yamahas that are incredibly inaccurate. As well the seadoos diagnostic software and tuning is just so much better. Techs can engage individual modules, like if I wanted to see if the fuel pump was having issues, I could trigger just the fuel pump to see how it is functioning (I can’t do that as easily on the yamaha with Candoo Pro). This saves us so much time when diagnosing issues like failed fuel pumps or bad injectors. As well seadoos dess keys make anti theft possible. Every yamaha just has a basic clip key that costs maybe $5 on amazon, yamaha’s are much more easily stolen in comparison. Seadoos can definitely still be stolen, but the coded dess key that only works for the specific jet ski it is synced to makes it much harder to steal without the key. The downside is these keys are around $65 and will cost a few hundred dollars to code (yes we have lost keys).
Anything Else?
Thankfully that is about it. The final thing we will say is the wear rings on yamahas are stainless, but you can upgrade the plastic seadoo ones to stainless as well (if you get tired of replacing plastic ones every 4 hours). I really do love my seadoos, I know it seems like I give them a lot of hate, but I say this so you guys know what you may be getting into. We work on our stuff for the most part, but parts are still expensive. If you guys are mechanically inclined it may not be so bad, but if not you may want to choose the brand more wisely.
Also if you guys are interested in checking out the different skis or just asking us questions always feel free, all of our skis and equipment can be found on our home page, and our email is on our contact page.
Thank You Guys
Evolution
