Reply To: Removal of gearbox on 1991 2.3hp Evinrude

[Monte NZ]

Hello Fleetwin and biilw
Thanks very much billw for your reply. All very interesting……..a lot of which I didn’t know!
Today I had another look at it and decided to remove the power head and see what I would uncover there.
GOOD NEWS! I’m pleased to report that the power head came off easily and straight away revealed the problem, that being the cooling pipe, in that it was stuck in the grommet in the top of the gearbox and wouldn’t pull out.
Thank goodness that I hadn’t tried to continue prizing the gearbox off, as it would have wrecked the cooling pipe!

All I had to do was to gently lift the curved top end of the cooling pipe with its square grommet and let the gearbox slide down. However it stopped about half way down
I then looked down the trunk again and could see that the cooling pipe by chance had wedged it’s self between the drive shaft tube and the trunk.
A gentle prod with a long screw driver got the pipe out of the way and the gearbox slid out nicely.

Interesting to note that the square drive shaft inside the drive shaft tube was in mint condition.
That tube idea seems pretty good to me, as it certainly keeps the drive train free of corrosion.

Thanks very much once again for your help and I hope this might be useful to someone else in the future.

MonteNZ