My firm belief is that the replacement latch will hold fine. In my case, I did not find that the spring was an issue, it was the ball end that clicks into the spring loaded ball and pin; you can feel the grooves created over time through wear of constant cick in and out. The spring itself, which i looked at, is perfect after 12 years. This is my experience and situation, yours and that of others may be different.
As for the Zuke's, love em! Took a while to get the rig fine tuned and i'm still not done, but on the overall they are great and I would not go back to Yamaha (but that is probably more due to a now deeply embedded digust resulting from bad expeiences with F225's and F350's) . The major issue we had from the get-go was major cavitaion issues while trying to get on plane once they were installed. This was a mind bender - I changed 3 sets of props, was about to rip out the new Raymarine RV 220 transducers i just put in thinking that they were the cause and then at the last minute, when we had the boat out of the water again, the engien trim jsut didnt look quite right when trimmed all the way down; we learned that Suzuki 'factory defualt' blocks the trim on the engines flush with the bracket and does not allow the engines to get tight to the boat. They explained that this is because of complaints of vibrations when they are tight to the boat and what not. I told them this boat needs them tight tight and they gave us the sequence to override the factory defualt setting and just like that the problem solved, she shoot out of the hole in a blink. I'm working on getting the props optimized for best fuel economy. They sent 16 x 21.5P, which are too big, i'm not hitting rpm at WOT, but the fuel economy at cruise is outstanding. I can tune it to get 1.78 mpg at 27-28kn. The smaller props i tried, which are the same ones i ran on the F225's (15.25 x 19P) are hitting RPM at WOT, but fuel economy is comparable to the F225's, which is really not what we want given a new repower with enignes 13 yrs newer! WIth both sets of props i had incredible top end speed, 44-46kn. So, im at the cross roads of either trying a 4 blade prop or cupping the smaller 15.25 props and i'm not concerned with loosing top end speed, I rarely gun it and lord knows I need the fuel economy (I do between 320-35hrs/season). Again, overall great engines, they are alot easier to work on, everything is alot more accesible (you dont have to take apart half the engine to do simple maint things, T-stats, etc.). So far so good!
