Finally made it to the lake yesterday. I’d been waiting for my brother to come so I could get it tuned in and have tools. He brought his boat and I rode my ski. It was very late in the day so I was only out for 2 hours but I did have a great sunset ride.
Ran the ski on the hose for about 10 minutes the other day and let the engine actually break in. I let it cool down until the next day and re-torqued the head. Then yesterday I decided to go down to the lake since my brother could finally make it.
At first, the ski was still running fat and I could tell but I needed to get away from the boat ramp and to an area I could tune the carb a bit. The ski would barely move under heavy throttle and was smoking a lot. I got to a shoreline as quickly as possible which was pretty close and tied the ski up to my brothers beached boat so I could make some adjustments. I had to turn the low speed screw in almost all the way to get the best idle and crank the idle way up... I figured the wrong jets were installed from Harry and didn’t think much of it, it’s a carb and you should expect to be tuning it. So to make use of the time I swapped the plugs for a fresh set, the ones I had already ran were wet and black. Then I tried turning in the high speed screw just to see, it actually made a difference. Why? Because I had my idle turned up so high that it was getting fuel from both circuits. I decided to try to ride the ski as it started to show signs of power while blipping the throttle. I pulled away from the shore and it was better, but still wouldn’t rev. I tried turning in the high speed screw again, this time it felt even better. I pulled away from shore and the ski finally jumped alive and I was able to pop up! I gently rode the ski around for a minute or so and cane back and check everything to make sure I wasn’t too lean. By this time the ski had “cleared out” and was idling way high! I popped the hood and turned the idle back down, tied the ski to the boat and tuned my low speed in. I got it to a normalish setting around 1.5 turns out, and then rode for a minute or so. Came back to check everything and made an adjustment to my high speed screw and then that was the trick. The ski was rideable. I spent probably an hour actually riding and trying to be as gentle as possible on the fresh engine
all my temperatures were very low, in fact my pipe seemed cold and I think I need to adjust my water screws. I do have a leaking fitting as my ski would continue to slowly fill with water when it was running. It also did this on the hose but was minor so I ignored it for the tine being. I’ll track it down today, I can’t tell where it’s coming from, just that there is water collecting in the hull after a while. Anyways, the ski ran well but not great. I was happy with the power when it would come on, it has great horsepower but it’s lacking in the low end brap. I think that’s a matter of tuning this ski in though, I can feel it there. When I took the ski out of the water and cleared it out, a normal amount of water came out of the exhaust this time so that’s nice haha. I will say that quick blips of throttle have a bog when revving it from idle. I need to figure out what Harry put into this carb as far as jets and pop off but it should be very close to correct for this engine. At first I wasn’t sure but after the ski cleared out it ran acceptability. I think this was residual premix from when I had originally assembled the engine over a month ago. All of that collected in the crankcase causing the ski to not run properly at first. It does idle well now in the water and only stalls after idling for too long, it also restarts easily so those are good signs. Anyways I guess I’ll get into some carb tuning soon so I can go out and give this thing hell! Didn’t get any pictures last night but I’ll post some soon of the complete ski, she’s out of this world.
