Sorry for not keeping up. I sold my old Swan a few months ago and I
just cruise this site to feel like I am still in the game.
I saw your last posting and to answer, the lever was on the
forward side of the head. I occasionally would bump it while doing
other servicing, it would make a pretty strange noise with I would try
to start it with the lever over. It seems like the flywheel was so
huge, that most my energy went into getting it started turning. I would
then just put in a little more effort to get it going faster, then flip
the lever. There was so much momentum in the flywheel, that there was
no hurry to hit the lever, and little chance that it wouldn't start.
It had bad compression and the transmission was toast, so I
replaced it with a Yanmar 3YM. That in combination with the folding 3
blade prop made a huge improvement. It worked great, other then a rod
trying to abandon ship though the block in Cabo after the 2004 HAHA.
Fortunately Yanmar paid for everything to be fixed in Cabo.

I have a site of our trip at Harlanadventures.com

Keep sailing
John

tdw wrote:
Someone did reply to my original post re decompression but said post has now
disappeared and my reply to them has not appeared here either.
This is just to thank them for their reply.
Cheers
TDW