Motor help!

I was on the river yesterday and left the beach with my family….I open the 2008 40 hp efi 4-stroke only to go 200 yards before my motor warning signal alarmed. I shut down the motor, trimmed up to see if anything was on my motor and then restarted the motor. At first it was not spitting water but I gave it a couple seconds and the motor started spitting a normal stream of water. Went to give it gas and the motor would not go….just above idle the motor would start to bog down and spit n sputter and not go, I then went back to idle and it was fine. Ended up idling back to the landing for 500+ yards and the motor appeared to be hot. Pulled it out of the water and checked it over to find nothing out of normal.

Any thoughts or ideas?

I just had mine do that; check and replaced the spark plugs, replaced fuel line and it didn’t do anything.

found out the switch box went bad and got that replaced and it works like a top.

good luck. start with the easy fixes.

Dan

Kind of sounds like what mine did when a sensor went out in the oil reservoir, but that was on a 95′ evinrude. I couldn’t figure it out, just seemed like it wasn’t getting fuel and would cut out once you tried to give it much throttle.

Its hard to diagnose outboard problems, even with a small older motor, you think its one thing, and its something completely different.

Have you ran it since? Just wondering if you may have plugged your cooling system thus reaching overheating and then the motor kicked into safe mode which would limit the rpms until the engine cools to a safe temp. Good luck!

Quote:

---

Just wondering if you may have plugged your cooling system thus reaching overheating and then the motor kicked into safe mode which would limit the rpms until the engine cools to a safe temp.

---

I was thinking the same thing. there are places in you cooling system that can be plugged and you’ll still have a steady stream at the outlet. You mentioned being at a beach….sand could have easily gotten sucked up in there.

I think you guys are on to something there. I did run it yesterday morning and it did it again….went 200 yards and alarm signaled and would not allow me to do anything. That tells me right that once it cools down you can run it until it heats up.

Will check it out.

The reason you can’t get speed or RPM’S is the motor went into self presevation mode. Something is wrong and to prevent major damage the new motors protect themselves this way. You still can idle to the ramps but it won’t let you run with any spped.

Swing by your local dealer and get a scan. That will tell you what is wrong and from there you can decide if it’s something you can fix yourself.