aj06bolt12r
Active Member
FYI this is also posted on scream and fly...
Allison xb 2003 with a Jay Smith built 225 ProMax 30 HRS on engine, assembled about 1 year ago.
I bought the boat knowing the engine is not running correctly and the P.O. who is a stand up guy put me in contact with Jay Smith via text. Jay told me to give him a call.. So I did.
Now, to be clear Jay has never made a penny off of me.. but he took my call and proceeded to talk to me on the phone for over an hour on a Sunday evening! I find that amazing. That kind of customer service is above and beyond and exceedingly rare to find. I'm not even technically a customer.. yet. Cannot thank him enough for taking the time... I have 2 pages of hastily scribbled notes in which I tried to capture the flood of technical knowledge he gave me for nothing! Hopefully I'm capable of putting that knowledge to good use and isolating the problem.
Other than a public thank you... (sent him a gift card as well ) the reason for this post is to try to understand something he told me and hopefully get some opinion for you all.... I forgot to ask him to clarify some things during the conversation, it was moving fast and I was trying hard to get good notes. Anyway...
I was telling him that with the engine idling I was performing my version of a cylinder contribution test by pulling plug wires with the engine idling while using my timing light for a tach to see how much each cyl was contributing. I have #1 and #4 doing virtually nothing... #2 and #6 make a small difference when unplugged... #3 and #5 appear to be doing most of the work and I loose about 150 rpm if either of those two are unplugged... Probably I misunderstood or am just confused but he stated that the results of this test basically mean nothing. Having certain cylinders contributing much more than others at idle is of no consequence.
Would anyone be willing to take the time to explain how or why this is? I'm a lifelong mechanic but a newb to outboards... so I'm just not understanding... I would like to know the theory as to why this is the way it is.
Later in the conversation I brought this up again and he did mention that having #1 and #4 so weak could point to a bad trigger.. which is a new CDI unit instead of a Merc part. I'm going to take his advice and order a Merc trigger as well as a stator. The stator is a 1 year old merc part installed by Jay himself but it is OHM testing bad.
Stator results. OHM test...
BLUE to RED leads should be 3500-4200 mine reads 2309
BLUE/WHITE to RED/WHITE leads should be 3500-4200 mine reads 2373
RED to BLACK should be 90-140 mine reads 32.4
RED/WHITE to BLACK should be 90-140 mine reads 32.1
Incidentally those readings are exactly in spec with a CDI stator? Maybe I actually have a good CDI stator?
Also I forgot to ask him what might cause such a new Merc stator with 30 hours on it to go bad... another ignition part possibly?
He gave me a ton of other stuff to check as well but I wont type it all here, I think I have my head around most of the rest of it...
Oh yeah, he mentioned Mercury "blue" oil... anyone know exactly what that is? Premium plus maybe?
I cannot possibly call him back and ask him this myself... I already took too much of his time for no return on his end.
Allison xb 2003 with a Jay Smith built 225 ProMax 30 HRS on engine, assembled about 1 year ago.
I bought the boat knowing the engine is not running correctly and the P.O. who is a stand up guy put me in contact with Jay Smith via text. Jay told me to give him a call.. So I did.
Now, to be clear Jay has never made a penny off of me.. but he took my call and proceeded to talk to me on the phone for over an hour on a Sunday evening! I find that amazing. That kind of customer service is above and beyond and exceedingly rare to find. I'm not even technically a customer.. yet. Cannot thank him enough for taking the time... I have 2 pages of hastily scribbled notes in which I tried to capture the flood of technical knowledge he gave me for nothing! Hopefully I'm capable of putting that knowledge to good use and isolating the problem.
Other than a public thank you... (sent him a gift card as well ) the reason for this post is to try to understand something he told me and hopefully get some opinion for you all.... I forgot to ask him to clarify some things during the conversation, it was moving fast and I was trying hard to get good notes. Anyway...
I was telling him that with the engine idling I was performing my version of a cylinder contribution test by pulling plug wires with the engine idling while using my timing light for a tach to see how much each cyl was contributing. I have #1 and #4 doing virtually nothing... #2 and #6 make a small difference when unplugged... #3 and #5 appear to be doing most of the work and I loose about 150 rpm if either of those two are unplugged... Probably I misunderstood or am just confused but he stated that the results of this test basically mean nothing. Having certain cylinders contributing much more than others at idle is of no consequence.
Would anyone be willing to take the time to explain how or why this is? I'm a lifelong mechanic but a newb to outboards... so I'm just not understanding... I would like to know the theory as to why this is the way it is.
Later in the conversation I brought this up again and he did mention that having #1 and #4 so weak could point to a bad trigger.. which is a new CDI unit instead of a Merc part. I'm going to take his advice and order a Merc trigger as well as a stator. The stator is a 1 year old merc part installed by Jay himself but it is OHM testing bad.
Stator results. OHM test...
BLUE to RED leads should be 3500-4200 mine reads 2309
BLUE/WHITE to RED/WHITE leads should be 3500-4200 mine reads 2373
RED to BLACK should be 90-140 mine reads 32.4
RED/WHITE to BLACK should be 90-140 mine reads 32.1
Incidentally those readings are exactly in spec with a CDI stator? Maybe I actually have a good CDI stator?
Also I forgot to ask him what might cause such a new Merc stator with 30 hours on it to go bad... another ignition part possibly?
He gave me a ton of other stuff to check as well but I wont type it all here, I think I have my head around most of the rest of it...
Oh yeah, he mentioned Mercury "blue" oil... anyone know exactly what that is? Premium plus maybe?
I cannot possibly call him back and ask him this myself... I already took too much of his time for no return on his end.