How was your weekend? We started out dodging rain on Friday night, which worked out better than we could have hoped. We barely got a drop and only saw two other boats out on our lake, which is just incredible for a Friday night in July. I guess the earlier storms scared people away, but man, if you can bust out right after the rain passes, you get a flat lake to yourself.
Crappy pic of a beautiful (and totally unexpected) sunset:
Figured out what was wrong with my boat (it ran poorly last Wednesday night, and I hadn’t had a chance to look at it until Friday. Pulled off the distributor cap and found crusty nasties. I would have done that Wednesday were it not for TORX screws holding it down. I thought this was ‘Murica, but I guess I was wrong. If this was a Honda it would have been a 10 mm, which of course I have. Hell I have just about every other kind of thing BUT torx in my tool set on the boat.
Before - and this is technically AFTER I hit the contacts with sandpaper as a troubleshooting measure.
after
Sometimes it IS that simple. I have no idea how old the cap & rotor were, but with the extremely humid weather we had last week it was JUST enough to push it over the edge of running poorly. Whether it added some corrosion to the contact points or the air made of 50% water was too much for the engine to run (in combination with the crust), either way it’s all better now.
It definitely has been moist in there, though - the screws that hold the rotor down were pretty nasty - I will be replacing these, once I can locate them. They appear to be #4 x 40 thread x 1/4" long. #4 x 36 is standard. Why would these be fine thread at such a small size? Do you know how hard it was NOT to drop one of these into the distributor, or into the bilge, onto the engine or anywhere, doing this in the water with the boat rocking back and forth and occasionally bumping into the dock? Do you know how many #4 x 36 screws of various sizes I found in a jar of miscellaneous screws in our garage, but none of the fine-thread variety? [/end rant]
Spent yesterday picking blueberries and floating around here:
And my daughter wanted to go for a spin with my dad in his 15' Thompson. What a great little boat. If our boat is like a Suburban, this is a 1974 MGB convertible. Small, light, loads of character and doesn’t need a lot of power to be fun:
I hope you all had a good weekend too!