I struggled with hard starting on the first crank of the day this winter. Once started, it ran fantastic and cranked with just a bump of the key the rest of the day. It ran really well other than seemingly fouling plugs after extended periods of low speed idling that would go away once the fuel/oil burned off and I throttled up. I decided to clean the carburetors as I have done many times successfully in the past. I found the bowls and passageways very clean considering 4 years of regular weekend usage. I cleaned all the low speed orifices with a soak in some carb cleaner and used a piece of copper wire to clean low speed jets, and high speed jets. I replaced all the seals in the carbs as well as the float needles and seats. I removed the welch plugs and mixture screws completely and cleaned those out as well. I also replaced the diaphragm and gaskets in the "prime start" part of the carb and blew out those orifices as well. I tested my Prime Starter assembly with a multimeter. It did indeed expand about 3MM when I fed it 12 volts, but it had higher resistance than my manual called for. It called for 2.5 to 3 ohms and mine had 8.5 ohms. It did not get 12 volts from the lighting coil with the key switch in the on position but I did not test it while running. I assume since I am not having charging problems or other issues that the lighting coil is working and feeding it 12 volts, but have not verified. Upon reassembling the carbs it started up like it was new. Hooray, problems solved I thought. Didn't have time to run the boat but ran great on the hose. Fast forward to next weekend, I see fuel leaking out of the middle carb bowl! Damm, pull off carb and re-seat the gasket properly. Found the little rubber plug that blocks the low speed jet off in the bottom of the bowl! I put the middle carb back on and verified no fuel leaking and it was fine. But it was again hard starting! I drove the boat and it had tons of power in the midddle and upper range but bogged bad when throttling up from an idle. It also just kind of "sounds" bad, almost like it has an air leak. But I replaced all the gaskets between the carbs and the engine block. I set the mixture screws to 1.5 turns out and it ran pretty poorly, seemed to like a little extra fuel to minimize that bog but its still there and idling badly. I also replaced the pickup, fuel lines, and primer bulb since all that stuff was dated. To eliminate bad gas I drained all the fuel and put in fresh gas and it still runs bad. Where the heck do I go from here? I'm getting a good hot spark that jumps a proper gap too. Could this Prime Start high resistance be causing this issue? I'm really doubting my wrenching skills here since this thing is running worse all around than when I cleaned the carbs, but I've done it a bunch of times before. If the prime start has indeed failed, wouldn't failing in the "cold" position mean its feeding more fuel to the motor than necessary? Wouldn't that mean it would start fine, but just be running rich since the needle isn't fully extending to close off flow of excess fuel? Could that alone provide for a crummy idle and bog? Should I go back to the drawing board and break these things down again and assume maybe I missed something or maybe one of the rubber plugs fell out of the idle jets like what happened to the middle carb when I opened it up? Sorry for the dictionary of a post here, just wanted to provide more info than necessary and let you decide. Thanks.
