Well I know it's been a while, but life just happened and I got busy. I ended up bringing the boat in to a shop since I didn't have time to troubleshoot any further. I was able to get spark after cleaning up some poor electrical connections but it still wouldn't run. The shop ended up finding that one of the electromagnet choke plates had fallen off and after reinstalling it, the motor fired right up! I went ahead and had them replace the water pump and change the lower end oil too. Unfortunately they didn't notice that there was a fairly large crack in the exhaust housing and it leaked water pretty bad... They did a patch job on it with some JB weld type stuff and said run it till it dies!
The first trip out went pretty good, but I have a few questions being new to this older boat scene. Regarding the warm up lever, how should this be used properly? I got it to fire up and run with the lever in the up position, but after 5 minutes or so it would still die when I dropped the lever back down. I idled it for maybe another 5 minutes and then pushed off from the dock, only to have it die again. I got it started back up by squeezing the primer bulb on the fuel line a couple times (which didn't have any pressure in it) and then ran it with the warm up lever up at a 45* angle facing the stern. This working fine for a while and I was able to drop the lever once underway, but after maybe 10 minutes of motoring around at different speeds, it sputtered and died again.
Squeezing the primer a couple more times let it fire up again for another 10-15 minutes or so of boating. This time we got up on plane for a bit and made some sharp turns, then we slowed down and it died again. Squeezed the primer a couple more times, lifted the warmup lever for start and it ran just fine all the way back in where it died just as I put it into neutral at the dock...
Any thoughts on the matter? I'm thinking it's probably a carb issue as it seems fuel related, but I'm open to suggestions. Is this just how these motors are and am I using the warm up lever properly as an idle control? I tried to avoid driving with the lever up, but it seemed like I had to use it somewhat to keep it running...
The only other thing that I found strange, was that there seems to be a lot of play in the MerControl lever... From the neutral 12 o'clock position I can move it forward all the way to 10 o'clock before anything really happens, then between 10-9 o'clock is where it responds. Is this normal or is there some kind of adjustment? Also, sometimes I could go full throttle forward and the boat would seem to max out at a rather slow speed, then after a minute or two it would start to take off and accelerate all on its own (granted the shift lever was in the fully forward position, it just took a while to get there).
