tilt & trim inoperative from buttons

[NHGuy]

I have an 89 Mercruiser Alpha 1. I was under the dash doing some repair and somehow botched my trim controls. There is no up and no down using the 2 switches on my throttle lever. I checked the motor, it runs both ways. I checked both solenoids, they run. I plugged in some jumpers to the plug on the tilt & trim assembly and got both up & down to work.
The plug has 2 blue wires and 1 green. I only see 1 blue, 1 green 1 red, 1white, & 1 purple by the control.
I'm running out of ideas.
Any thoughts?

 

[Don S]

Re: tilt & trim inoperative from buttons

Have no idea what control you have or how it was wired, but it's possible yours was set up to pickup power for the trim switch in the control from the instrument panel instead of the trim pump.
Power normally goes to the trim switch through the red purple wire from the trim pump. Does your control have a wire that color hooked under the dash somewhere?

 

[NHGuy]

Re: tilt & trim inoperative from buttons

Well, that's interesting. Mine gives me the impression that it merely completes an up circuit or a down circuit. At least that's how the plug by the pump & solenoid assembly seems to work when jumped. Do the switches usually have a 12 volt source? I'm going to do some reading in the manual so I can understand how the limit switches and the whole setup works. i just know it's some dumb little thing I did. It always is.

 

[NHGuy]

Re: tilt & trim inoperative from buttons

Thanks for the prompt.
Yup, it does have it's own power, which I had disconnected to do a different job. Fixed it.
If I had to wrench for a living I'd starve. Or my memory would get better. Maybe I shouldn't do detailed stuff after I have been up for more than 14 hours.