stgodsfarm
New member
New poster, new boat owner. Decent mechanical knowledge, but no expert on 2 strokes by a long shot and new to outboards in general. Bought the manual, trying to diagnose:
Bought the boat 3 months ago. Very little use by the last two owners over the past 20 years or so. No knowledge of use before that. Been running it in saltwater down here in Savannah and have taken it on a couple longer trips, one over 40 miles a couple of weeks ago. Rebuilt lower foot due to hitting a rock jetty which punched a hole in it and bent the spindle by running it too fast on the way back after the impact. Boat had a carb job and new plugs when I bought it; seemed to run just fine. I put new wires on it as well as some minor tune-up stuff.
Was out on the water yesterday with a full load (2 families on my 700# max boat... probably about at that capacity) running at low speed (we did get on plane a couple of times during the afternoon but never ran it wide open) when all of a sudden it lost a lot of power and was obviously missing badly. Limped back to the ramp. Pulled plugs and got 100, 95, 95, 105 on my new crappy compression tester. Noticed problems on 3 & 4 plugs when I pulled them out: 3 had a completely closed gap and a dent which obviously indicated impact inside the engine. 4 had a chip in the ceramic insulator inside the engine. The plugs are the type recommended by the manual (so not too long or anything like that). I also tested the #3 piston for give with a push rod at bottom of stroke thinking that maybe bearing was going out but did not find any play. My hypothesis was that the bearing was worn and caused the piston to hit the #3 plug and then the insulator on the #4 cracked under the extra load on the way back. BUT, I can't notice any play, so that doesn't seem to be an accurate hypothesis.
What am I missing?
Bought the boat 3 months ago. Very little use by the last two owners over the past 20 years or so. No knowledge of use before that. Been running it in saltwater down here in Savannah and have taken it on a couple longer trips, one over 40 miles a couple of weeks ago. Rebuilt lower foot due to hitting a rock jetty which punched a hole in it and bent the spindle by running it too fast on the way back after the impact. Boat had a carb job and new plugs when I bought it; seemed to run just fine. I put new wires on it as well as some minor tune-up stuff.
Was out on the water yesterday with a full load (2 families on my 700# max boat... probably about at that capacity) running at low speed (we did get on plane a couple of times during the afternoon but never ran it wide open) when all of a sudden it lost a lot of power and was obviously missing badly. Limped back to the ramp. Pulled plugs and got 100, 95, 95, 105 on my new crappy compression tester. Noticed problems on 3 & 4 plugs when I pulled them out: 3 had a completely closed gap and a dent which obviously indicated impact inside the engine. 4 had a chip in the ceramic insulator inside the engine. The plugs are the type recommended by the manual (so not too long or anything like that). I also tested the #3 piston for give with a push rod at bottom of stroke thinking that maybe bearing was going out but did not find any play. My hypothesis was that the bearing was worn and caused the piston to hit the #3 plug and then the insulator on the #4 cracked under the extra load on the way back. BUT, I can't notice any play, so that doesn't seem to be an accurate hypothesis.
What am I missing?