1997 Evinrude 25HP 3 cyl.
For those that have given me some helpful advice, I REALLY appreciate it. I broke down, watched a good 2 hours of YouTube and grew some shark balls and cleaned my carbs. Not too bad as some of you pointed out. 2 were fairly clean but cyl #2 had quite a bit of crap in the float chamber. Gave it a thorough cleaning and re-assembled after I blew out the fuel lines. Fired it back up and played around with the adjustments (pretty tedious with three carbs) until I got the low speed idle steady. Sitting here now and it's been running steady at low idle for 15 min straight.
Now the issue... it's burning a lot more oil (smoke from prop and lower housing exhaust). I have not changed the plugs yet as NGK BR6HSs are not too easy to find locally. Would slightly fouled plugs cause excess smoke? I could see where it might as there is less combustion but I am still learning this thing and trouble-shooting seems to be a rabbit hole with this one. Lol. The good news is that I checked compression and cyl 1 and 2 are at 121 and cyl 3 was about 118. I can live with that.
For those that have given me some helpful advice, I REALLY appreciate it. I broke down, watched a good 2 hours of YouTube and grew some shark balls and cleaned my carbs. Not too bad as some of you pointed out. 2 were fairly clean but cyl #2 had quite a bit of crap in the float chamber. Gave it a thorough cleaning and re-assembled after I blew out the fuel lines. Fired it back up and played around with the adjustments (pretty tedious with three carbs) until I got the low speed idle steady. Sitting here now and it's been running steady at low idle for 15 min straight.
Now the issue... it's burning a lot more oil (smoke from prop and lower housing exhaust). I have not changed the plugs yet as NGK BR6HSs are not too easy to find locally. Would slightly fouled plugs cause excess smoke? I could see where it might as there is less combustion but I am still learning this thing and trouble-shooting seems to be a rabbit hole with this one. Lol. The good news is that I checked compression and cyl 1 and 2 are at 121 and cyl 3 was about 118. I can live with that.