I have a pontoon with a 1997 Mariner 60HP outboard on it. It runs rough. What does it do? In the order of irritation I will list them:
1. Generally it will idle okay (not perfectly) while it is in neutral. Put it in gear (forward or reverse) and it starts to miss and will stall. My buddy turned up the idle but it did not seem to help much. I changed all three spark plugs and there was no improvement. I thought maybe there was water in the fuel so I bought a brand new gas can and that didn't work either. My buddy adjusted the timing by sound (no timing light with us) and it sounded better but still does it. I cannot troll or dock the boat because it stalls.
2. Motor misses at low speeds
3. Cruising along at 4500 RPM’s, once in a while out of the blue she will start to loose RPMs fairly quickly then just stall and die completely. Then I start her back up and she takes off. 3 Hours later, she will do it again.
Last night after I talked myself out of not throwing it into a deep hole I took the cover off. I was looking around for problems that might be obvious to a non-mechanic guy like myself. And, by gosh I think I found a serious problem. There is a black square device on the engine behind the starter that has 5 or 6 wires coming out of it. They are all fitted with disconnects with insulation. Well, three of them must have gotten very hot at some point and melted together and melted the insulation off. Please see the pictures.
My instinct was to get wire cutters out and cut out the bad connectors and put new ones in. However, I decided before I did that I better try and figure out the root cause of the melting. What made this happen? I would like to attempt to prevent future occurrence of the same issue. Again… Please see the pictures.
Any help will be appreciated.
1. Generally it will idle okay (not perfectly) while it is in neutral. Put it in gear (forward or reverse) and it starts to miss and will stall. My buddy turned up the idle but it did not seem to help much. I changed all three spark plugs and there was no improvement. I thought maybe there was water in the fuel so I bought a brand new gas can and that didn't work either. My buddy adjusted the timing by sound (no timing light with us) and it sounded better but still does it. I cannot troll or dock the boat because it stalls.
2. Motor misses at low speeds
3. Cruising along at 4500 RPM’s, once in a while out of the blue she will start to loose RPMs fairly quickly then just stall and die completely. Then I start her back up and she takes off. 3 Hours later, she will do it again.
Last night after I talked myself out of not throwing it into a deep hole I took the cover off. I was looking around for problems that might be obvious to a non-mechanic guy like myself. And, by gosh I think I found a serious problem. There is a black square device on the engine behind the starter that has 5 or 6 wires coming out of it. They are all fitted with disconnects with insulation. Well, three of them must have gotten very hot at some point and melted together and melted the insulation off. Please see the pictures.
My instinct was to get wire cutters out and cut out the bad connectors and put new ones in. However, I decided before I did that I better try and figure out the root cause of the melting. What made this happen? I would like to attempt to prevent future occurrence of the same issue. Again… Please see the pictures.
Any help will be appreciated.
