The boat is a 1986 Wellcraft Elan with a 4 barrel 4.3L omc V6 and cobra outdrive. I bought it from my dad's neighbor for 500 bucks, he claimed it ran and that everything worked fine. We started it up and sure enough it sounded great, drained the oil in the lower unit and there was barely a pinch of water and the oil was fine looking. We took it out for this past weekend and after many stalls going into gear we finally get it moving. There was a bit of vibration when it was in forward and it made a very faint scratching noise. When we finally opened it up the boat went to about 3k rpms and the front of the boat reared up but never plained out and just held about 10mph. I figured the engine was misfiring but we tried again and were able to get it on plane with my two passengers on the bow. It got up to maybe 30mph or so for about 30 seconds and then suddenly just cut off, didn't stall and slow but suddenly "clunked" dead. Sounded like we had locked it up, however we got it started again and limped back to the dock, about 20 feet away from the dock there was a very loud grinding/clunking sound and the engine cut sharply again. The engine still turns over but as soon as it fires it makes all these clunking and grinding sounds and cuts. If it were the engine making these sounds I would have to think that it wouldn't even turn over, we had good oil pressure the entire time and the oil pressure still comes up as soon as it fires. But now for the realizations.
I checked the shift cable after getting on this website and realize that it is black, so good chance damage has been done to the gears through this. The other thing I did notice however is that the fin on the bottom of the out drive was bent to the left by about 1.5 inches to 2 inches. It also came with a brand spanking new aluminum prop which had never seen the water, weird considering this boat came stock with a nice stainless steel prop. After further inspection we noticed that the prop doesn't spin on a perfect axis, it does have a very slight wobble. All of these things are an indication that this boat hit something that ruined the prop, bent the fin on the outdrive, and bent the shaft causing it to wobble. If this boat hit something like a log or a rock while it was under power, what exactly would be damaged in the outdrive? Could it possibly have caused whatever damage I am hearing when the engine starts up? I am pretty mechanically inclined so I'm going to pull the transom this weekend and see if its anything obvious.
I checked the shift cable after getting on this website and realize that it is black, so good chance damage has been done to the gears through this. The other thing I did notice however is that the fin on the bottom of the out drive was bent to the left by about 1.5 inches to 2 inches. It also came with a brand spanking new aluminum prop which had never seen the water, weird considering this boat came stock with a nice stainless steel prop. After further inspection we noticed that the prop doesn't spin on a perfect axis, it does have a very slight wobble. All of these things are an indication that this boat hit something that ruined the prop, bent the fin on the outdrive, and bent the shaft causing it to wobble. If this boat hit something like a log or a rock while it was under power, what exactly would be damaged in the outdrive? Could it possibly have caused whatever damage I am hearing when the engine starts up? I am pretty mechanically inclined so I'm going to pull the transom this weekend and see if its anything obvious.
