Welcome to boat ownership - am I right? Ugh!
I've got the above motor on a 2013 18' Alumacraft MV 1860 AW SC. This boat/motor combo was gifted to me by my aging father. But it isn't without issues. Two summers ago my Dad accidentally refueled the boat with regular 87 gas, when he hit the lake with it, he found the receipt and quickly got the boat off the lake, drained the fuel and re-filled with non-ethanol gas. He also added fuel stabilizer (whichever brand he used). The boat sat after that till last summer. I visited him and we took the boat out. It started up perfectly, idled fine, ran well on low throttle through no wake zone but once outside of that, she runs like CRAP with anything over medium throttle. Almost like it is starved of fuel. No shuttering, no smoking, no stalling, no shutting off - merely like a loss of acceleration. It's had all of it's scheduled maintenance up to now and has less than 10 hours on the motor. So - before taking this now out of warranty motor to the repair shop and paying someone a deserving $100+ an hour labor charge and parts costs - where do I start on it at home? I yanked the cowl off and read the manual thoroughly to get an idea of what I'm even looking at. Anyone else have this same issue? Was it a matter of simple fuel filter replacement? Spark plugs/wires? Or was it a matter of removing FSM and cleaning it? Was it the fuel pump? Injectors? Someone throw me some lines as to what I might expect. Newb here on a boat motor repair - be easy on me.
I've got the above motor on a 2013 18' Alumacraft MV 1860 AW SC. This boat/motor combo was gifted to me by my aging father. But it isn't without issues. Two summers ago my Dad accidentally refueled the boat with regular 87 gas, when he hit the lake with it, he found the receipt and quickly got the boat off the lake, drained the fuel and re-filled with non-ethanol gas. He also added fuel stabilizer (whichever brand he used). The boat sat after that till last summer. I visited him and we took the boat out. It started up perfectly, idled fine, ran well on low throttle through no wake zone but once outside of that, she runs like CRAP with anything over medium throttle. Almost like it is starved of fuel. No shuttering, no smoking, no stalling, no shutting off - merely like a loss of acceleration. It's had all of it's scheduled maintenance up to now and has less than 10 hours on the motor. So - before taking this now out of warranty motor to the repair shop and paying someone a deserving $100+ an hour labor charge and parts costs - where do I start on it at home? I yanked the cowl off and read the manual thoroughly to get an idea of what I'm even looking at. Anyone else have this same issue? Was it a matter of simple fuel filter replacement? Spark plugs/wires? Or was it a matter of removing FSM and cleaning it? Was it the fuel pump? Injectors? Someone throw me some lines as to what I might expect. Newb here on a boat motor repair - be easy on me.