“Sorry, you can not add any shims/gasket between the skeg and upper gearcase housing, that won’t work”
Yeah, I was thinking about that. Not a good idea. Besides, I know this unit has worked in the past. I looked the gears over, carefully comparing them to the diagram. I cannot find anything to make me think they are wrong. Perhaps tomorrow after work I can post pictures of the upper gear case with and without the prop shaft and gears. Maybe someone with a sharp eye will see a detail I am missing. Otherwise, I am inclined to think the pinion is being held too close to the gears and the compression is causing the interference. One clue that I can share is that when I test fit, I tighten the screws down gradually and check for tension on the shaft as I go. From a point of maybe slightly more than a 1/16 of an inch or so there is no resistance, but as I go tighter, the shaft begins to bind and I can feel the tension building and slipping as I turn the driveshaft. It feels like the gears moving on the pinion. But not smoothly. Maybe I don’t have the right gears. I am not able to locate those at the moment. I may have let those go as they were trashed. I have been told that those gears were intended to be a matched set. I don’t see these gears offered on Marine Engine so I probably would have bought them off Ebay. To the best of my knowledge, there is no part numbers etched on these gears, so I must have just gone with the info on the listing and hoped for the best. It’s been years since I got these so my memory fails on the details. Wondering how I might best see how well those teeth mesh?
