SJohnson76
New member
I have a '73 johnson 65 that I acquired a little over two years ago that had been sitting at least 10 years. The first summer with it was a process of tuning and replacing parts as necessary but by the end of season it was running good. My first outing this summer I pulled out from the dock and it ran great for about 15 minutes then I lost power at WOT, limped it back to the dock to discover a broken coil wire. I replaced all the plugs and coils with new, but since then it's been about the same experience every time I've tried taking it out. I've bought a new plastic fuel cell replaced all the fuel lines/filters and cleaned the carbs (per what I've read on this forum and others) ive gone through and made sure the carbs and throttle linkages are set how the Seloc manual says. Two of the high speed jets were pretty gummed up while cleaning so I thought that was my issue but it appears not. The engine fires up easily and will idle as long as you'll allow whether in the lake or with muffs in the driveway. It will very rarely give me anything increase in power past quarter throttle, when it does it will only run at WOT for a couple of minutes before reverting to its old underperforming ways. I ran a compression test multiple times on each cylinder and came up with an average of 128, 123, and 91 from top to bottom.
I am fairly mechanically inclined but this is the first outboard I've owned or worked on, and I'm sort of at a loss. I've seen on the forums a lot of guys say as long as you test above 90 psi you should be alright but I don't like how the one cylinder is so much lower than the other two. The previosily mentioned broken coil wire was on yhe cylinder thats testing low, did i damage it limping it back to the dock that first day? Could this be my issue or should I continue treating it as a fuel delivery problem? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
I am fairly mechanically inclined but this is the first outboard I've owned or worked on, and I'm sort of at a loss. I've seen on the forums a lot of guys say as long as you test above 90 psi you should be alright but I don't like how the one cylinder is so much lower than the other two. The previosily mentioned broken coil wire was on yhe cylinder thats testing low, did i damage it limping it back to the dock that first day? Could this be my issue or should I continue treating it as a fuel delivery problem? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
