New Impellers getting Chewed up

[SMERRILL]

I was finishing up with some work on the boat today before the first rides of the season. All fluids changed. New impeller. New filters. Bildge cleaned out. Only thing I had to do was hook up the fake a lake and get her up to temp as a test run. Everything was working well for about 2 min until the exhaust stopped shootin out water. Needless to say I VERY quickly jumped up and shut her down. Pulled off the fresh water inlet to the transmission cooler and noticed some impeller pieces. New impeller lasted 3 minutes. Pulled apart the hoses and cleaned everything out. Put in the spare impeller. Tried it again. Same result. Impeller chewed up. A good $80 bucks lasted a total of five minutes. That hurts.

I ended up pulling off the impeller housing and found the issue. on the bottom of the impeller housing where the water enters/exits there's a plate that is actually separate from the housing. One of the forks on the plate had somehow got turned up and was chewing up the impellers. Once I found the problem it was pretty easy to fix, but I have NO idea what caused this. How in the world did this happen? My first impeller lasted two years. I've never overheated. I've never run it dry. Anyone ever see this happen?

[Bake's Marine]

I've never seen that and we've serviced a lot of impellers.....

Glad you figured it out.

-Paul