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87 OMC Cobra outdrive shudder help

N

nverl8

New member
"I have an 87 four winns with

"I have an 87 four winns with a cobra outdrive and 5.7 motor. 50% of the time when you put it into gear it will shudder at idle speed, almost like it is not sure if it is all the way in gear or not. In the past I have just goosed the throttle a bit and pulled it back to idle speed and the shudder would go away. Today the symtoms got much worse. On the river today I could only get the shudder to go away about 10% of the time at idle speed and a few times it would clunk (again like it went into neutral and back into gear) while up on plane or when getting onto plane. However the shudder while moving above idle speed was not consistant and I could not get it to repeat, however it happened above idle speed at least 6 times over the course of the afternoon.

At this point I do not know if this could be a shift cable out of adjustment or something as bad as messed up gears in the outdrive. FYI, I had to have a new shift cable put on the boat about 2 years ago because it broke and am wondering if maybe the cable had to break in and stretch a bit.

Hopefully someone on this forum can give me a direction to start looking. Thanks in advance for any help."
 
"Sounds a lot like lower shift

"Sounds a lot like lower shift cable problems. The "shuddering" is likely the ESA (shift interrupt) engaging while in gear. A binding lower shift cable will cause this. "Clunking" in and out of gear is never a good thing.
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I am hoping it is something li

I am hoping it is something like the shift cable or maybe the ESA and not something as severe as gears. I have heard horror stories about the OMC outdrive gears. I am pretty good at working on cars but the more information I look over the more I think I should probably start looking for someone in my area that works on OMC's.

Obviously as soon as it started getting bad I pulled the boat out in hopes that i did not cause any additional damage.
 
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