"mike hicks" wrote in message
...
OK, so my boat's on its trailer in the front yard because of Isabel and
I decide to remove some of the barnacles on it instead of cleaning up
lawn debris and while I'm at it I manage to drop the nut that holds the
little plastic cooling water intake grate onto the side of my Alpha
drive down the propeller exhaust hole! Of course the nut that
Mercruiser chose to use isn't the standard size nut for that thread
(it's smaller) so I'll have to go by a new one only they probably don't
sell just the nut so I'll probably have to buy a whole new outdrive. My
real question is (finally) what will having that little nut rattling
around in there do? I assume it will fall out as soon as I plop the
thing back in the water and start up the engine but is there anything in
there it can hurt?


Pick up your boat and hold it over your head, then rotate it every which way
it while shaking it. The nut should fall right out. Of course at that
point it will just get lost in all the lawn debris that you didn't clean up
because you decided to fart around with your outdrive instead. If that
doesn't work, perhaps you could remove the prop and run the engine on muffs.
Rev the engine a couple of times while in neutral (very briefly, they don't
like high RPM's while on the muffs) and see if you can blow the nut out from
exhaust pressure. Probably would be a good idea to put a tarp or something
underneath the drive so that if the nut does come out, you have half a
chance of finding it.