I'm new to the forum, so bear with me. I've had my boat for about 10 years and until this month I've never had a real problem with it. It's gotten regular maintenance and stays covered in the off months, so it's not been abused. I've got a Force 40 hp that came on my Tracker boat 10 years ago. It's labled as being made by Mercury. A week ago I took it out and made it half way across the lake when it just shut down. Sounded flooded and wouldn't start, It wasn't a great morning anyway so I just trolled my way back to the ramp, pulled it out of the water and pulled the cover. It looks like the insulation on the top of the cover sagged enough to melt the plastic cap on the bolt on the flywheel (looks melted and found the cap in the carb throat). I removed it, wiped out the throat and she fired so I shut her down and headed home. I did go out during the week and hooked up the hose to make sure all was good. After a little coaxing (and setting throttle about 1/2) I managed to get it to start up, but it kept bogging down (idled at 700ish) in neutral and would stall. I adjusted the top rod on the throttle and got it to settle at 1000 in idle, tested it a bit with prop both engaged and disengaged and it seemed fine (couldn't figure out why I needed to adjust anything since it was running fine until it apparently sucked in the plastic cap) but it all seemed well. Yesterday we took it out and although she stared up fine, and would easily redline with prop disengaged, when I engage the prop, I've got nothing. Full throttle barely gets to 3000 and she won't even plane out. We again made it a short day and trolled our way around back to the dock. I did notice that my amp gauge spiked up to about 16 when at full throttle and would hang there 10 seconds or so then suddlenly drop back to about 14. I know my way around engines and have tools to rebuild a Miata engine but I've never been in this one beyond changing plugs. Any ideas?
