Hi,
My dad recently inherited a 1996 fishing boat with a 1996 Mercury 115. It had a fairly major serving not long ago. A few times recently it has died while running. Once it wouldn't start for up to 15 minutes, but other times it starts up fairly quickly. During the failure time, there was fuel in the priming bulb.
I'm learning about this engine to see if I can help him fix it. We took it out for a couple of hours today with the cowling removed so we could check for spark and look at the fuel filter, but it didn't fail. Perhaps it's a heat issue, or perhaps we just got (un)lucky today.
Being new to this engine, I may be making some bad assumptions. I'm assuming it's unlikely to be a carb problem since there are four carbs and losing 1 probably wouldn't completely kill the engine. Same for coils. Agree?
After we got back, I noticed that the fuel was at the middle of the fuel filter. Not knowing what these look like internally, I'm not sure if that's correct. Can somebody confirm? I also noticed that the fuel filter is reversed compared to the photo in the Merc manual. It also idled really rough running on earmuffs, but I'm not sure if this is related to the intermittent problem or something else entirely. Here's video of it running at idle until we shut it off. https://youtu.be/yLBs3N4QxWs You can't easily see the fuel level, but it's about halfway up the fuel filter.
Thanks for any help!
Mike
My dad recently inherited a 1996 fishing boat with a 1996 Mercury 115. It had a fairly major serving not long ago. A few times recently it has died while running. Once it wouldn't start for up to 15 minutes, but other times it starts up fairly quickly. During the failure time, there was fuel in the priming bulb.
I'm learning about this engine to see if I can help him fix it. We took it out for a couple of hours today with the cowling removed so we could check for spark and look at the fuel filter, but it didn't fail. Perhaps it's a heat issue, or perhaps we just got (un)lucky today.
Being new to this engine, I may be making some bad assumptions. I'm assuming it's unlikely to be a carb problem since there are four carbs and losing 1 probably wouldn't completely kill the engine. Same for coils. Agree?
After we got back, I noticed that the fuel was at the middle of the fuel filter. Not knowing what these look like internally, I'm not sure if that's correct. Can somebody confirm? I also noticed that the fuel filter is reversed compared to the photo in the Merc manual. It also idled really rough running on earmuffs, but I'm not sure if this is related to the intermittent problem or something else entirely. Here's video of it running at idle until we shut it off. https://youtu.be/yLBs3N4QxWs You can't easily see the fuel level, but it's about halfway up the fuel filter.
Thanks for any help!
Mike