Hi Joe, I'm glad that you chimed in. I am way past the basics with this motor. I'm going to have to start from the top!
Started the motor running on ear muffs and found the motor running erratically and then noticed that the fuel pump leaking. I replaced that with all of the fuel lines and all the way back to the tank and new fuel tank as well. The motor would run but only at high RPM's without coming down to idle with the remote unit but by moving the spark advance down by hand. I took the air box off of the carbs and there was a broken vacuum line going from the intake to the silencer box. I replaced it. After going nowhere I then decided to rebuild all 3 carburetors with rebuild kits and was not a hard task including soaking all 3 carbs in gum out for 24 hours before reassembly and blowing compressed air through all of the parts.I felt that there was some issue with the way the throttle linkage was set up and you sent me the linkage set up. I set the entire thing up per instruction and it seemed to straighten out the idle problem. Things seemed to be improving. And oh yes as a recommendation of this sight I did a compression test on all 3 cylinders and it was good, 115 to 120. I did a spark test but didn't realize until seeing a comment about measuring a 7/16th spark. The tester I have is adjustable. I think I was pretty close to that but need to recheck. I also did replace the #2 coil because the spark plug wire would not stay in place. Last but not least I went to check the timing with the WOT process that I also got from you and here where my results. I hooked the timing light with spark tester to #1 cylinder and could not see see the timing mark. Just for grins and giggles I then hooked the timing light up to the bottom (#3 cylinder) and got the correct timing reading. This really confused me making me think that the bottom cylinder was #1 and of course it is not. So my big question at this point is it possible that someone threw the timing off far enough to where it is reading that way on #3 instead of #1?? What got me to the point of a timing issue was that I thought that the motor was running much better after all before checking timing that I put the boat in the water, Start it up and she would run until put into gear forward or reverse and she would just bog down and stall. As well, if the timing is the issue and needs readjustment, is there a separate timing adjustment because I cant find an adjustment or is that all together in the throttle linkage adjustment. I know it's a lot. I think that the the guy before me put a lot of things out of wack.
Hope that you can set me straight!
