www.iFourWinns.com

2004 Horizon 180, Mercruiser 4.3 EFI

First time out this season and we have had a re-occurance of last seasons problem.

After the engine has warmed up. Accelerated up to 30mph (slalom skiing) and we got a warning alarm (Beep - Beep), repeats after 10 seconds, then after another 10 seconds, the engine then cuts out.

Engine will then re-start straight away.

At the annual service, the workshop took the boat out for a trial and thought the problem was related to the kill switch / landyard. They recommended that we remove the landyard from the toggle switch. They also double checked all the earthing on the dash board as we have had intermittent problems with the rev counter stopping and occasionally the temp gauge dropping to 0.

The dash board dials are the 'simpler' auto type with feeds and earth wires. No fancy electric boards.

Checked the Mercury manual and the only audio warnings listed are the oil pressure too low / engine temperature too hot - both continuous horn, and intermittent horn for low sterndrive oil level.

This has the workshop and me stumped.

Any help gratefully received as this could ruin my summer holidays!

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Warwick
Pukekohe, New Zealand

Hi, This should be a easy fix.

It's pretty common for the main wire harness that is coming from the helm and plugs into the engine wire harness to be loose, Not pluged in all the way, Or missing a hose clamp to help hold it on, Or if it has a hose clamp it could be over or under tightend to much, It's pretty sensitive on how it needs to installed. What is happening is the engine vibration is basically turning on and off the ignition real fast, That is why the horn is going off here and there, And the gauges keep going in and out also, It's pretty common with a loose wire harness plug.

The wire harness is call a 10 pin cannon plug, It is a black plug with a hard rubber style plug with wires coming out of it, And it plugs into the engine. Turn the key or engine on and wiggle the wire harness around and watch the gauges to see if they move Or see if the engine dies.

If anything does die then about the only thing you can do to fix this is either try to adjust the plug to fit a certain way and clamp it down just right and keep wiggling the plug till you get it so every thing works good with the engine on, Or sometimes we had to use a wire tie to hold the plug in a certain way so the wires would not move around and kill every thing. But if you do end up needing a wire tie to hold the plug, Try to not use a lot of pressure so that the wire tie will not cut into the rubber plug over time. Also you can try to open the wire pins A little bit to try to make better contact on the inside of the plug, But to be honest I always did it even though it did not seem to help really, But it's at least a piece of mind that you did your best with it.

Good luck with it I hope this helps get it, It should, I did a lot of these like this for four winns and some others to.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. We are going back to the boat today and I will double check. The buzzer does seem too regular to be an intermittent problem of a loose connection and when the engine dies, we do not get any buzzer warning.

I have seen other posts that talk about temperature warnings as the engine warms up to do with the thermostat. I am going to keep a close eye on it as anecdotally, the problem only sems to occur when the boat is first used for the day and after a half hour or so, the alarm stops.

Will post an update in a week or so when we get back from the water ski club.

Cheers

Warwick

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Warwick
Pukekohe, New Zealand