The engine looks great in white but we basically chose that colour so that I could see any oil or diesel leaks. We did have one leak on the injection pump and I could see the pink stain (red diesel was legel then) as it seeped from the pump, a tightening of a nut sorted that out though. We were very keen to get a non-turbo engine that was fairly low revved and this was one of three that we could buy with those guidelines. There was also the Perkins and the Doosan, but we thought the ford would be easier to find spares for since it is a marinised common truck engine.

We had the engine solid mounted to the engine bed which meant the engineers at MMS in Hull had to make the alignment to the short propellor shaft very accurate. This initially caused a problem as the flnge on the PRM showed more miss-alignment than the engine manual said was acceptable. PRM sent 2 engineers up immediately with a spare flange and changed it to give better but not perfect results. It was eventually set up with just 4/1000" miss-alignment and seems pretty good. The soid mount engine probably gives more vibration and noise through the boat than a flexible mounted engine but there seems less to go wrong and Waterdog is big enough and heavy enough to get away with it.

We have a dry exhaust and cooling water outlet that is just below the deck level. This is a hang over from the commercial days of Waterdog when the freeboard could be anything from near zero to 5 feet. We decided the dry exhaust was a simpler way to go than wet and would fit with what was there already.