Reply To: 1967 Evinrude Lightwin won’t start/run

[mierla]

By gum, it’s running!

Thank you all, so, so much for all your help and suggestions.

And joesnuffy, thank you especially for the videos – it hadn’t clicked for me when each of those adjustment valves would matter and when they wouldn’t.

Per fleetwin’s suggestion, I set the low one at 1.5 turns, and the motor ran for a few seconds before quitting, on the second pull. Progress!

And then, thinking about Joe’s videos and need2fish’s comment about the missing butterfly on the throttle arm, it dawned on me that when I put the throttle cam back on after examining the leaf valves the last time through, maybe I didn’t get it snugged up enough and it’d shifted.

Sure enough, when I set the throttle at the notch on the cowling (another very helpful thing I picked up from yet another helpful thread on this site), and actually looked at it, the cam was nowhere near the shaft. It didn’t even *nudge* it until the throttle lever was most of the way to the right, where I was trying to start it.

I adjusted the cam forward to where it was supposed to be, snugged up the bolts, and by golly, that little motor started up and kept right on running on the next pull. Seems I may have been starving the poor thing.

So I guess the motor had a few problems, not the least of which was the person wielding the wrench and her imperfect understanding of how it was supposed to work. Sheesh.

But! Now that it’s running, it throttles up nicely, and down to about halfway to the slow mark, and then dies, as seen here (I didn’t go all the way to the top here, lest I throw all the water out of my bucket, but I did later, once I had the hose at the ready to keep it filled up.)

Should I expect to get a slower idle out of it? My father’s regaled me with tales of somebody’s old Evinrude that idled so slow you could count the reps, but maybe that’s a bit of a fish story..

If it is possible to get it to idle more slowly, am I understanding correctly that *this* is when/where I would (more gently and patiently than before) adjust the low-speed valve needle?