Hello All,
I have a 2006 Four Winns Horizon H210 w/ a Volvo Penta GXi-g. I live in the Northeast part of the country, so our boating season is limited at best. There are approximately 200 hours on the engine and its been very lightly used for most of its life due to the fact that I keep it on a small lake and we mostly cruise.
At the end of last season I noticed a hesitation while throttling up and while cruising. It would mostly be a drop or jump of a 100-200 RPM's. I thought I had water in the fuel and mentioned it to my winter service/storage mechanics when I dropped it off for the season. They removed the fuel and put some new fuel in as part of their winterization process, but also found that my fuel pump need to be replaced. I had known that the pumps on these engines were an issue due to the paint chips clogging and there had been a whine from it for the past 5 or 6 years, but the boat had always started and run fine, so I hadn't had it replaced. Anyway, they replaced it during the spring make-ready process. As soon as I got it out on the lake for the first time this summer I noticed that the hesitation and changes in RPM's was still present. It would start/idle just fine, but as soon as I would start to throttle up it would bog down and then come back.
This got progressively worse over the course of 4 or 5 trips out and the last time the boat completely died out while on plane, did not shut off, just lost all power. I brought it to a stop, then took off again and it went right back up, but still have the hesitation issue.
I brought it back to the dock and the following week decided to try and check a few things on my own since all I/O mechanics in the state are booking our 4 - 6 weeks at this point. I pulled a couple plugs and noticed that they were in really rough shape. I went and purchased all new plugs (exact same model that I pulled out) and installed them. I also pulled off the distributor cap to check the connections. They didn't look too bad, but I used some emery cloth to clean up the terminals, cleaned everything back up, and reinstalled w/o messing with the rotor.
Now, when I try to start, the boat cranks like a champ for about 2 seconds, sounds like its firing up, then immediately dies out. It happens exactly like that every single time I try to start it now. It almost appears to be something shutting the engine down as it tries to fire up. I don't understand how changing spark plugs would take an engine from running poorly while under load to not starting at all. Does anyone have any ideas?
_________________ 2006 Four Winns H210 Horizon 5.0L GXi VP
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