honda460ex
Seaman
- Joined
- May 12, 2011
- Messages
- 69
Wanted some opinions here. While on the lake the other day my motor was running great with a light load. Few days later I had it out again, but this time it was loaded down with six people when I normally only have two in my bass boat. Ran great for a couple miles up the lake and then suddenly dropped from near 6,000 rpms to just below 5,000 rpms and started feeling extremely weak. Circled around and parked it for a while. Later when taking it another round it would hardly get on plain even with only three people in the boat this time. Every once and a while I could manage to slowly climb it out of the water and get on plain but it wouldn't go above 5,000 rpms once again. When testing the plug wires for spark with a gauge borrowed off of a friend I found that cylinder #5 wasn't sparking like it should. It had a very weak spark compared to all of the other cylinders. The gauge allowed me to test four cylinders at a time so it was easy to see compared to the others that it wasn't right. Also, the new spark plugs I had just put in were clean on 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, but 5 was wet. So obviously not burning off like it should. The common sense approach from someone who has worked on lawn mowers and atv's for years seems to point me in the direction that the coil is failing, but could I be missing something? I am by far no outboard mechanic. Could the failure of one cylinder cause an outboard to lose that much power that it couldn't hardly come out of the hole when it typically could in 2-3 seconds? What if a trigger starts going bad does it normally cause failure on all cylinders or could it start with one? Also, same for a switch box, if it goes bad will I typically see a failure in 3 of the 6 cylinders (since this motor has two switch boxes)? This is new to me. Any help is appreciated!
Thanks!
Thanks!