- Location
- Ontario, Canada
A buddy of mine picked up a jet boat just recently with a Mercury 4 cylinder 2-stroke inside. He was having a hard time keeping it consistently running properly. One time it would sound fine, another time it would barely run so he called me up to see if I could give him a hand with carb work and synchronizing them. No problem, I get there and we try to fire it up, no happening. Eventually it sparks up...sorta...but is blasting fuel out the carbs about as well as it is using it. So we figure it must be something in the needle valve of at least one of the carbs. Nope, the float bowls were great and the carbs were very clean. Not knowing these engines or the Tillotson carburetors I decided to take a quick look at the parts breakdown. In the top right corner of the diagram there is a very small little oddly shaped box, I knew right away at that point...reeds. We dove into the engine and this is what we found....
I have never seen a full set of reeds self destruct like these ones did. The engine uses 4 quite small cages with what look to be about the same size of reeds as the SuperJet reeds. The base had about 4oz. of fuel laying inside and as best as we could tell, no damage on the cylinder walls or crank. It looked spotless inside with a balanced compression of 140 across all 4 cylinders.
So how about it? What kind of awesome maximum destruction have you guys experienced? Post your pics, I love to see this stuff.
I have never seen a full set of reeds self destruct like these ones did. The engine uses 4 quite small cages with what look to be about the same size of reeds as the SuperJet reeds. The base had about 4oz. of fuel laying inside and as best as we could tell, no damage on the cylinder walls or crank. It looked spotless inside with a balanced compression of 140 across all 4 cylinders.
So how about it? What kind of awesome maximum destruction have you guys experienced? Post your pics, I love to see this stuff.
