Motor trouble

[Joe]

Two weeks ago, the Mercury runs fine at wot and I was able to restart it multiple times without issue. Today I get on the water and it doesn't turn over. Take the cover off the flywheel and the starter motor is only turning the flywheel 10 to 25 degrees. So I keep bumping it, same result, eventually the water starts to boil in the battery. So I drag the boat home, remove the spark plugs, and the starter turns but sounds weak. Put the plugs back in, and it is back to turning 20 degrees at a time. Tried a different battery, same result. Compression 120 across all four cylinders.

safe to assume the starter is shot?

 

[Davey Crockett]

Are you positive both batteries were fully charged ? If it spun fast last time, your starter should have still been good but something must have got hot if you boiled the battery. Did you feel the starter ? It might be a bad connection or cable. I'd throw some jumper cables on and see what happens.

 

[WLYHNTR]

my cable connections were loose on my cranking battery on tuesday and had basically same issue. Hope that is all it is.

 

[eyexer]

you can jumper the starter with cables from your vehicle to see if it spins good. If not need a new starter.

 

[Joe]

Well, I dug into it again this morning and removed the starter. Behind it was covered in 2 stroke oil and gasoline. Turns out one of the bleed system lines broke and sprayed a good amount. At this point I don't know if I should be relieved it didn't catch fire? So I clean up the starter, take a jumper cable to it, and it sounds like garbage. It would barely turn when I had the pressure gauge connected to one cylinder for the pressure test. So a new starter, and I'll have to redo the bleed lines and who knows what condition the other hoses are in. The oil pump on these elpto' s has always worried me. Basically my boating season is officially over.

 

[Kickemup]

That sucks could of been a lot worse it there would of been some sparks.