I triple checked the firing order, its good to go. Plug wires look
OK. I checked for arcing in the when the sun went down... looks good.

I dropped the boat in the water this morning. Re-cleaning the
metering block didn't fix the problem, it was still stumbling at low
rpm. Tried the easiest thing first, put in the old coil. And it
seems to have fixed the stumbling at low RPM problem!! The old coil
has fluid in it, the new one doesn't. Was the old coil a marine
specific coil or something that prevented overheating? Or did I just
get a bad coil?

There is still a little bit of hesitation upon hard acceleration, but
I am guessing that I can adjust the accelerator pump to push more gas
through? I don't know carb adjustments very well.

And I still can't get it over 4000 rpm.

Any other thoughts on these other two problems?

Thanks everybody.

(GVB) wrote in message om...
I bought a 1989 MasterCraft Pro Star 190 w/ Indmar Ford 351 motor.
While test driving the boat would hesitate and backfire when jumping
on the throttle from an idle, but ran fine otherwise. Didn't think
much of it and ended up buying the boat.

Changed oil and filter.
Changed plugs.
Changed water seperator filter.
Changed fuel filter.

* Took it back out in the water and it ran the same.

Installed a breakerless ignition kit (replaces the points and
condenser with a magnetic pickup).
Replaced the distributor advance springs with new ones that came with
the kit.
Replaced cap and rotor.
Replaced ignition coil.
Set timing to 10* before TDC.

* Took it back out in the water and it still backfired, but not as
much. The hesitation problem was still there. But now I couldn't get
it past 4000 rpm (should top out around 4500-4800). And the motor
would stumble at any constant speed below 2000 rpm. It seemed to get
worse as the longer the boat was running. When trying to get it up on
the trailer it kept stalling.

Put the old distributor advance springs back on.
Rebuilt the carberator.
Reset timing.

* Just took it back out on the water today and I am still having the
same problems, although the backfiring is gone.

We rebuilt the carb using lacquer thinner and someone recommended
taking the metering block back out of the carb and soak it in carb
cleaner for a day or so because lacquer thinner doesnt disolve gas
deposits and buildup like carb cleaner does. This person (reputable)
seemed to think that the symptoms still sound like a typical carb
problem.

So the metering block is in the garage soaking. I also had plans to
drop the boat in the water tomorrow and try putting the points
ignition, cap/rotor, and old coil back on and see if that helps.

Can anyone think of anything else I should be looking at to try and
solve this? I havn't measured the resistance of the plug wires, but
they look pretty new. Possible fuel pump problem?

Thanks in advance.