This one isn’t a customer job, it’s a bit of a project

The boat was picked up on Ebay - an ex water taxi with a 115hp Honda 4 stroke engine which had sunk and spent some time under water!

It’s very ugly! Beyond that though it’s a 7 metre fibreglass hull with a stainless steel framed aluminium and plywood superstructure on top.

The large cabin area makes it easy to set it up as a nice cruiser, and the hull design should give good performance without needing too much power. It’s rated to carry 8 people.

The first step was to check out the engine, which wasn’t running - not surprising after being underwater! It had apparently been running at some point after the sinking, and still turns over.

A quick bit of testing showed no real life in the electrics, no diagnostic output from the ECU, and no start signal from the ignition key.

I figured it was most important to check out the mechanical condition of the engine first though.

It still turns over by hand which is a good sign, but removing the airbox and throttle body showed the intake to be packed full of salt - which is a bad sign!

Obviously water has made it well past the throttle, which also means that the throttle position sensor and MAP sensor are likely to need replacement.

Removing the intake manifold showed that the water has definitely made it right through the engine, as the valves are all rusty and there are lumps of salt sitting in the ports!

Not being one to pass up a challenge, I’ll continue stripping it down to see the extent of the damage, and can hopefully get it running again without it costing too much. If not, it’s still worth a fair bit as parts.

The boat will be getting another engine for now, to get it on the water as soon as possible.

Back to the boat itself, the first step was to remove all the excess rails, bash bars, etc.

This neatens up the style of a a lot, and I’ll be extending the roof bars to the front to form an encloseable front deck area.

All the interior fittings have been removed, and the inside pressure washed to get rid of the massive amount of mud the boat had accumulated while sunk.

I’ll be rebuilding the controls and all electrics, and of course the boat will be repainted in a slightly less conspicuous colour!

This engine had become very hard to start, and wasn’t running 100%

Its wiring had been hacked up in the past and it was running a few non original ignition components.

I stipped down the carbies and found that the low speed mixture adjusters were worn and able to move around much more than they should.

Retuning the low speed mixture got the engine starting much better, but it was still missing at higher rpm.

I found that the spark was dropping out on cylinders 2 and 4, and adjusting their corresponding fuel mixtures had a large effect on the missing.

As a temporary measure, after adjusting the idle mixture, I set the adjusters in place with some silicone sealant.

The spark was still a bit intermittant, so I pulled the flywheel and distributor setup apart and cleaned it up.

The spark plug leads were not in great condition, so I replaced the two troublesome ones with some normal car ignition lead to see if it helped.

The new leads and cleaned distributor seemed to fix the spark issue, so the engine was ready for a proper test in the water.

I added a “telltale” hose fitting to keep an eye on the cooling water flow, as this engine didn’t have one.

On the water, the engine started much better, and seemed to run ok to begin with - before developing its misfire problem again.

After adjusting the tuning, changing the spark plugs, and generally trying everything possible while out on the water, the engine was still misbehaving - so chances are the worn carbies are the main problem, and the distributor is probably bad too.

So, this one is ongoing!

This was a pretty simple one.

The owner had just bought a nice Nissan 200SX (S15 Silvia) and found that it was misfiring randomly while driving, and running on three cylinders.

He found that wiggling the plug on the #4 ignition coil would often fix the problem for a while, so the blame was correctly placed on the coil wiring loom.

I re-tensioned the pins in the plug on the loom, which I’ve had good success with in the past, and it appears to have fixed the problem - at a much lower cost than replacing the loom!