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1997 Johnson 150 - Sputters then stalls out

D

dafinga

New member
Hi All,

Hopefully someone might have a suggestion on what i could check next on my engine.

Here is some back story

Just picked up a 88' Grady White Overnighter w/ a 97' Johnson 150 on the back.

compression all checked out good. seller started it right up and had it running on a 6 gal tank for us to show it ran (on land mind you) - he claimed the boat was sitting for a year and he drained the tank to store it.

he did mention however that he believed the oil portion of the vro was bad - conveniently we had a spare that worked since the last boat we sold had one so we figured we'd mix for now and install the pump later this week.

on the way to the harbor we stopped and threw in about 12 gallons of gas to the on board tank, threw it in the water; started driving it over to the spot....died...

i notice when we flipped the fuel switch on the boat however its showing almost half a tank. to my knowledge its a 65 gallon tank (most likely original)

Moving on, we started tinkering with the engine on the 6 gallon tank cause i believed a problem with the engine. it would running for maybe a minute then almost out of no where die out.

As of today, i installed the new VRO and used a non mixed 3 gallon tank and the engine for the most part ran in idle (in water) for almost an hour! put it in foward gear....fine, reverse....fine. so i figured what the heck, try the onboard tank now (since im officially confused as hell)

swaped the lines, engine goes back to dying out again. put the 3 gallon back and tried to crank it over and stall out a dozen times (i guess to burn out the "bad" gas from onboard) and it would go back to normal and idle.

so at the moment im wondering perhaps theres a problem with the onboard tank?? perhaps water in the tank? one think i did notice is some of the onboard gas spilled over board and would turn milky white when it hit the saltwater?! i've never seen that before....

i did also just installed a fuel/water separator which when i let the nozzle out the gas that comes out of the bottom appears fine.

if anyone has any suggestions i would greatly appreciate it. Ive been tinkering all week with the boat and driving my self crazy.
 
If it won't run on the in board tank then you know you have a problem; most likely it's got a lot of water in there. You need to completely drain the tank and start over. Probably need new fuel lines from tank to engine and also under the cow. Make sure the tank is venting properly. Good luckl
 
Hey! Thank you so much for the quick response

so today we took a 3 gal tank down with fresh gas and started it up. once it warmed up we felt like living dangerous and wanted to put around the harbor to see how it was running. <5mph around harbor is was a tad rough in my opinion (perhaps the carbs are junked up a bit?) but once we left harbor we opened it up just alittle then came right back in, i felt it ran awesome! i ran smooth as hell the faster we opened it up. once we slowed down however it was still a tad rough

so i was thinking about picking up some seafoam spray foamand spraying it into the carbs and trying it again (& perhaps some seafoam gas additive to run that thru as well) , as well as dumping all the gas in the tank (once i can figure out where the hell to take it) then we are going to rip open the hatch and inspect the tank it self just to confirm there's no holes or corrosion on it.

does that sound like a reasonable next move?
 
I think you have found the problem; it's water in the tank you can probably siphon the gas out into gas cans and filter the water out of it and burn it your car, truck or lawnmower, that's what I do with old gas. Once you put more gas in the tank put the seafoam in with the gas ad probably mix oil at 50:1 to make sure you are lubed if you think the VRO might t be working won't hurt the engine at all. You are going to need new hoses under the cowl on the engine itself. If you can't smell gas then I doubt your tank has a leak. Seafoam sprayed down the throats of the carbs is a waste of time according to the gurus since all you are doing is cleaning the throat of the carb. Seafoam in the gas goes thru the carbs I would also add Stabil to the gas. Good luck.
 
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