Engine Problems, how I spent the day

So I got an aluminum boat a 13.5' and I'm pretty stoked with it. Today I was going to take her on her maiden voyage on a local impoundmet to wack and stack some pike. I got there put her in and tried to crank the motor and it wouldn't go. Seemed like some problem with the fuel delivery so I sprayed some gas in the carb and it fired right up but wouldn't stay running. So I figured that maybe the fuel pump was bad. I came home and went to town trying to get the line off the carburator side of the fuel pump to see if gas come out when I yanked the cord. Well I did get that line off but not before I snapped off a fitting that goes into the carb which rendered the engine useless. After all of this the fuel did in fact come out of the line, so I now know two things:
1.The Problem is in the carbureator
2.The fitting to the carb is now broken

So I took it to some guy that's going to charge me $50 an hour to fix the whole thing. Not exacly what I had in mind for the afternoon.

There's a lesson in here somewhere

Had to have my 3 hp Evinrude worked over last season because I had left some old gas in it at the end of the previous season - I'm blaming that trick on the aging process because I just had forgot to drain-out/burn-off the gas left in the motor as I normally would. When I got it out the first time in the spring it would hardly run and , of course, the problem being it was gummed up; a new carburetor kit cured the problem.


Dale

last summer i bought a boat with a 1985 115hp merc. the sellers said the motor had just been rebuilt, new carbs, ran it for me on the hose, sounded great. bought the boat. got it home, put it in the lake, and realized there was no power, couldn't get it up on plane. so... long story short... i learned way way way more about rebuilding outboards than i ever wanted to. i can now brag that i've rebuilt the ignition, fuel, and electrical systems. it runs ok. not great. never again. yeah, right.

your problem may not be with the carb, but a set of points under the flywheel

I recently bought a boat with an internal jet drive and a removable 4 stroke engine. When I got the boat the engine kept dying after a few minutes of running. The company replaced the fuel line (twice) but both of the new fuel lines seem to cause the opposite problem (the engine would start fine but whenever key old would immediately flood). Of course, this was very frustrating. The company stood by the boat very well. They even sent me an engine that they knew was working to get me back on the water while I sent my engine back to them. Of course they could not re-create the problem but they believed a small fiber or something had gotten stuck in the carburetor. They had a boat with a similar problem before. Now if I could just get the lights on my trailer fixed...

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Chuck Hitt