meanwhile at Iowaboy1's shop

Looks very sharp!

Blue roof? Wishing you were on the water?
You’re a long way from any blue water.

Looks great Sheldon.

Oh, did I tell ya the passenger side of my truck and starboard side of my boat has a bluish haze on it that I got when leaving your shop last Monday? A bit of elbow grease and compound got most of it out though.

Looks really good Sheldon. Might as well make the shop look like the great work your producing my friend.

Where do we start?? ah yes, remember that Optimax that I did a bunch of tuning on and scared the bejeebers out of the owner because he didnt know it would run like it did when I was done with it ?? heres the spark plugs out of that motor, and the thermostat that was blocked open on one bank.
A few more pump impeller shots, one of them is twenty years old, guess which one.

Rats!!, or mice, chipmunks or some dang rodent,, Heres the setup, Doc,, shes run’n poorly and I have added tune up in a can, changed the plugs and she just wont open up like she should can ya take a peek at it??
Mind you this a 1978 60 HP Evinrude that has been owned by the same guy since new.
Two reasons it doesnt run right, one, the carbs were out of sync mechanically and two,, well, you can see that most likely a wad of that nest got ingested into the engine and I can tell you by the idle quality alone its wounded and isnt long for this world.

Parts these days, folks, these are genuine OEM gaskets, we should all be very proud of the values of hard work and taking pride in what you do that we have instilled in todays workers.
I could really go off on this subject but I will let it alone, the damage is done.
The top gasket is what the other two should look like, it took two more weeks to get the carbs back together waiting on correctly cut gaskets to show up.

Update on the 90 Merc that was frozen solid and full of sand in previous pictures and I installed a remanned short block and a customer provided cylinder head.
Worlds fastest destruction of hard work if I have ever seen, guys, I take a lot of pride in my work and I go out of my way to make sure a customer has the best experience possible when they spend any amount of money to get out and enjoy the waters in whatever fashion.
I explain what to look and listen for and once in a while it goes in one ear and out the other faster than a speeding bullet, and it happened in this one, huge deep sigh..
I wont know the whole truth as to what happened until I get word from the builder of the short block who has a spotless reputation and I trust without reservation, if it is their fault they will take care of it no questions asked, if it isnt there fault and is owner screw up I am going to walk away from it.
Why on Gods green earth would you take a fresh engine and head one way an hour from the ramp and turn around to find the motor is smoking badly after the wind blows it into your face??
And to top that off, instead of getting towed the hour back decide that its still running albeit poorly you drive it back an hour to the ramp??
The owner told me not once did he look back or check pump output on the way out, he just drove it, it was only when he turned the boat around that he noticed it smoking.
When I hear back from the builder I will update this.

Denny O,, can you please come down and replace a couple of six by sixes in the shop for me??
I have beaten them in two with my forehead, anybody got a great big band-aid??

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Gaskets.
Impeller pics are lost in space somewhere, when I find them I will put them up,stay tuned.

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Gotta love it go drive it like you stole it. Right after the repair or rebuild. The mentality of these idiots. I have the warranty so f it! Break it in easy and if any signs of issues get it back in immediately! Sorry rant over. I respect all customers but help me help you. Feel your pain Sheldon.

Heard this a hundred times.

Customer: “The red light came on 10 miles back but hoped to get it Home. Tow truck was was gonna cost $100.

Me: “OK. You ruined the engine it will be about $4800 to replace it. Good thing you saved the hundred.”

Ah Flyswatter, do I need to bring said 6×6’s, if so how long?

John Rasmussen wrote:

Gotta love it go drive it like you stole it. Right after the repair or rebuild. The mentality of these idiots. I have the warranty so f it! Break it in easy and if any signs of issues get it back in immediately! Sorry rant over. I respect all customers but help me help you. Feel your pain Sheldon.

You can’t help a guy who runs mismatched plugs and GeneraOil Lawn-N-Garden blend 2 stroke oil in a machine like an Opti. Even worse is he didn’t realize how bad it was running. My grandpa used to call these guys ham fisted from the hat on down.

The guy across the street pushed a Yamaha riding lawnmower to the curb and put a free sign on it. Engine blew he said.

How old was it? I asked.

Old. Probably 8-10 years, he said. How old is your Deere mower?

When I told him my more was a 1988 model he said wow that’s really old. How did you keep it running so long?

Change oil, I told him.

Wow. I didn’t think you needed to do that on lawn mowers, he said.

On the 90 merc, Did he have oil? or what you think failed? Or better yet what did you tell him on how to ease in to the break in?

bigcrappie wrote:

On the 90 merc, Did he have oil? or what you think failed? Or better yet what did you tell him on how to ease in to the break in?

Customer was given a copy of the builders break in instructions and told to follow it to the letter.
Plenty of oil in the crankcase but engine smokes heavily when running suggesting scored cylinder/broken rings, rings cooked from overheating etc.
I havent torn into it yet but by looking at the telltale stream and seeing that is only flowing about a third of what it should be tells me the cooling system is/was plugged with sand.
Pump impeller was new when it left my shop.

Stay tuned, I am hoping to get back on it this week.

Iowaboy1 wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>bigcrappie wrote:</div>
On the 90 merc, Did he have oil? or what you think failed? Or better yet what did you tell him on how to ease in to the break in?

Customer was given a copy of the builders break in instructions and told to follow it to the letter.
Plenty of oil in the crankcase but engine smokes heavily when running suggesting scored cylinder/broken rings, rings cooked from overheating etc.
I havent torn into it yet but by looking at the telltale stream and seeing that is only flowing about a third of what it should be tells me the cooling system is/was plugged with sand.
Pump impeller was new when it left my shop.

Stay tuned, I am hoping to get back on it this week.

Can’t wait for the next episode!!

Update on 90 Merc remaned powerhead failure.
I am very pleased to let ya know it was not owners effe up other than the stunt of waiting too dang long to check on the motor while underway, what did happen is this.
It was a part failure inside the motor, a wristpin clip failed and allowed the wrist pin to carve a trench along the length of the stroke you see in the picture.
That trench is over forty thousandths deep !!!!!!! no need to check it with your fingernail to see if it will catch!!

This will be fully covered by warranty, this block is junk and the builder is putting one together for me as I type this and I hope to have it in the next two weeks.
My labor, new oil pump, all new gaskets etc will be provided, now to find the time to do it over again, UGGHHH!!

Now for some entertainment, I get the privilege to tell the owner of a new two bank charger that his charger is junk because you cannot hook both leads to one post of each battery…………
Yes, he hooked both wires of one bank onto the starting battery’s positive post and both wires of the other lead to the positive post of the TM battery…… he said the power light came on for about two seconds and wouldnt come on again after that.

If anyone can tell me how that thought process came swirling through the cosmos and made sense to anyone please tell me how that is suppose to work???
I mean, there were pictures in the dang manual for crying out loud!!!!!

Denny !! I need another post !!!!

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I’ll get the 2nd one ordered!Super hard dense hickory 8″x8″ post are hard to come by, take it a little easy!

Stupidity and bad parts or motor in this case will drive a person to drink-or worse.

Your customer is 1 lucky idiot!!

Iowaboy1 wrote:

It was a part failure inside the motor, a wristpin clip failed and allowed the wrist pin to carve a trench along the length of the stroke you see in the picture.

Had that same thing happen in a snowmobile years ago. Man did it shred the crap out of the cylinder. Got it covered under warranty even though it was long over. Pays to have a good dealer.

Man, when my 2016 225 optimax went into the shop, it came out with an $11k bill. Those Optimax motors aren’t easy for most ppl to work on. I hear more people say they won’t work on those than will work on them. Your guy is lucky!

Another week in the books, and I hope I never have to go through another one like it!
A customer talked me into putting a motor in his jeep cherokee, well, that only took five weeks!! ??
Between getting someone elses motor by mistake, waiting a few weeks for the right one to show because they didnt have one ready,
Sensors failing because they have sat so long, and trying to work it back into the schedule as time allowed I finally drove it out Wed.
We received a call from a new customer two weeks ago wanting to know if I would work on a 1968 corvette, you bet I will!!
Finally! I get to crawl into the wayback machine and work on something that not only looks great but is easy to work on!!
I should’ve known that it was too good to be true, it only needed TWO things fixed, a power steering leak, and a tail shaft seal leak.
It got worse when the only time the guy could drop it off was sunday at noon, wth?? so we meet the guy and the vette is on a rollback.
???? It was my understanding that the thing ran, I quizzed the guy about not driving it down seeing as how it was a dandy day.

The guy says, it doesnt run, battery is dead, no brakes and its been sitting for five years,AAUGGHHH!!!
I just about told the rollback operator to winch it back on and take it back home to the guys house, why do folks do this crap!!??
I wasnt planning on more than what I scheduled it for, and I didnt have time for getting the pos up to snuff.
It sounded a bit better when I was told that it and two others like it stay in a climate controlled shop and he wants me to fix the other two.
Monday morning I go through it to see what was needed to get it mobile, list? power steering control valve, battery, cable ends,
drain the old varnishy fuel, rebuild the carb because its flooding over, calipers and pads in all four corners because they were leaking brake fluid everywhere.
The master cylinder wont pump an ounce of brake fluid, and the proportioning valve is stuck due to rust.
Working like a mad scientist on a new formula I whipped this thing into shape in one week, and I wonder why I am tired after twelve hour days,
2400 dollars and change later its road ready.
See pic of fuel in the soda bottle, five years old and deep into phase separation and stinks to high heaven.

Seawater pump in pieces next to bottle, came out of a FourWinns with a 4.3, been sitting for a year because it gets hot
even after an impeller replacement and the motor smokes when running.
Mind you, this was at a dealership twice last year for the same issue and you couldnt get a hundred yards from the dock and it would get hot.
See the impeller?? looks new doesnt it?? yep, and it hasnt turned one revolution since it was installed over a year ago, how is that???
Had the retar,,, ahem, the technician working on it had paid any attention when installing the impeller he would have noticed two things,
one, both V belts were loose on the pulley, and two, the bearing in the pump drive cavity was seized up and it was bad enough it spun the drive lug out of the pulley
and the only thing holding the works together was the torque strut.
The smoke was coming from the V belts slipping on the pulley, pricey repair as you can only buy the pump and pulley as a complete piece.

Points and condensers in the pic, Sigh, out of a 1969 Evinrude 18 HP, guy buys it off of craigslist after seeing a video of it running, buys it and heads to the lake.
Within a few minutes it starts running like crap, no spark to bottom cylinder, I get in the shop and look into it, points are burnt beyond saving by dressing with a file.
Tune-up kit and clean the carb, how it ran I dont know because whoever monkeyed with the carb had the dang float upside down allowing about a teaspoon of gas to get in the bowl!
Get it running and it sounds great!! for about a minute and it starts popping back through the reeds and out of the exhaust, I looked at the reed bypass tube and you can see water running back and forth through it, shoot!!
Call the customer telling him it needs a head gasket and he says hes not spending anymore money on it and will attempt the head gasket by himself,
Feeling bad about it, I only charged him for the parts and waived the labor, sure, I know it wasnt my fault that it came apart after fifty some years,
But I believe doing something like that is good business, besides, I was only out of a couple hours of labor, the guy was so impressed he bought a gallon of oil for his other motor and some other
things before he left, I still made some money at the end of the day.

Okay, I know some of you sharp eyed cookies are wondering, what about the tail shaft leak on the vette??
Ya, the old boy got his vettes confused, thats on one of the other ones he wants me to fix and he had them confused.
Folks, its time for a half dozen JP80’s, have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by the shop!

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You got some splaning to do Lucy!

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Thanks EPG for bringing this thread back around.
A month or so ago in my whats new at the shop thread I introduced you guys to my M5000 fuel injector tester and cleaning machine, and in my this year at the shop thread I told you about a guy who joined IDO to talk to me about his Mercury four stroke that was having issues with the fuel system.
I saved his old injectors and have been using them to learn all of the functions of this new machine, I was warned by the designer that the Yammie injectors were the worst ones to clean, they have four tiny orifices instead of two larger ones like most injectors.

If you remember from that thread, I had tried cleaning them the old school way and couldnt get them clean enough to look right, So I flow tested them on this thing and the spray pattern was identical to what I was seeing before, crappy and hardly any atomization.
After a certain delivery company finally got the bucket of solvent I was supposed to use without punching a hole in it this time I started cleaning these injectors again, a ten minute cycle and this occurred.

I had broken enough crap loose that the two injectors you see on the left were stuck open immediately after I started cycling them, YOWZA!!
Those two injectors were passing so much fluid the two on the right couldnt get any volume or pressure and you can see the results of it.
So this makes four times I had tried cleaning them, three times the old school way, this time and I was ready to toss them in the trash but I just couldnt give up on them seeing as how the OHMs and the oscilloscope readings were correct.
Back into the ultrasonic cleaner they went for twenty minutes this time while being cycled at a high rate again.

I reverse flushed them with the machine, and I blew them out backwards with shop air at 160 psi.
I installed new filters and ran them through their paces again.
FINALLY !!! they are flowing equally and at the correct amount of output during a sixty second cycle!!
I let the machine cycle them automatically which takes about seven minutes, leak tested them, and I ran them through an engine simulation cycle and this is where they ended up at, perfection!

I want to remind you from my other thread, Craig had been using an additive religiously every tankful in his boat, with around four hundred hours on his motor, (it was new in ’05 ) and he has owned it the last eight years, who knows what was used in it before he bought it, it is obvious that it wasnt working out.
I believe we have two problems here, one, the additive he was using isnt what it used to be, and two, more critically, todays gasoline isnt worth a sh!t.
Add ethanol to this equation and its no wonder if you are experiencing harder starts, rough running and very poor fuel economy.

My next statement is based on experience, I am not trying to sell anyone anything, but with the fuel problems we have today I have to agree with Scott who designed and builds this machine, injectors need tested and cleaned every two hundred hours or three years whichever occurs first.

I even have the fuel rail for cleaning the Optimax air injectors, if anyone here has the ability to remove their own injectors and will send them to me for testing, I will be more than happy to do so.
Long term IDO members will get a discount rate, otherwise I am going to charge 35 bucks per injector plus the filters and O-rings and they will be ready to install back into the motor when you get them.
You bet, there are places out there who will do them cheaper than I can, but I bet if you do some studying, they dont have a machine like this and they wont send you a detailed per injector report like I will.

As always, thanks for stopping by the shop!!!
Sheldon

Man I love reading these posts. I wish I had a fraction of your knowledge.

Bearcat, I seem to remember about three years or so ago a certain ground wire???
You had the tenacity to keep digging with a little guidance and you whipped that problem!!
If you can do that, anything is possible to learn if you want to.
Now, about that giant hole saw?? does that thing use a centering bit???
Good Lord, I cant imagine running that thing!!

A while back someone here was having trouble with their four wheeler snowplow melting the battery post off, in my reply I mentioned performing a voltage drop test to isolate a potential problem in the wiring and connections.
Todays pictures are perfect examples of why you perform that test, the motor turned over slowly and was drawing a ton of amps and turning off the Helix 9 and this is after another shop did the install on the graph and trolling motor two years ago, that shop did not do what I discovered but it should have been looked at while they had it.
I disassembled the starter to verify it was in working condition, it was and I put it back together and started doing the voltage drop test.

The test showed current loss on both the power and ground wires, odd?
It was bad enough there was a stack of wire connectors on the battery along with one of those blue heavy duty wiring connectors going from the battery to the motor cables.
I dug further back in the routing to see what the other side looked liked, I cannot believe why someone would think this was a good idea!!
Denny O, I need another post to bang my head on already!!

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Look at the connectors where they are bolted together, they didnt even have the motor wires hooked up first, at least they used a stainless bolt.

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Hey,
Look up!

Eelpoutguy wrote:

Hey,
Look up!

Did you drop him a Corona or what?

Sheldon I think you need to retire up to the Bemidji area and just do part-time work, I’m sure IDO members alone would keep your schedule full! You’ve forgot more about engines than I will ever know. Sure you’d have to trade in bullheads for walleye, but those sunsets should make up for it!

Geez IowaBoy that is some cobjob there!