engine cutting out - probably electrical

[WolfpackRider]

We're just starting a week vacation at a lake house rental, and our boat is having trouble!

While driving, the engine will cut in and out. When it happens, my tach needle will quickly drop and then go back to normal, and the Perfect Pass will turn off and then back on (the Perfect Pass has always been particularly sensitive to voltage drops). It doesn't happen all of the time. I haven't had it happen when just idling. When driving straight, it only seems to happen when we go over wakes. It happens much more frequently when turning either direction. I have disconnected the positive wire for all accessories from the battery so that only the main cable is connected on the positive post, and still experienced the problem.

The only recent maintenance work I've done is to replace the spark plug wires, the distributor cap, and the rotor button. I've wiggled the spark plug wires while it was idling, but that didn't cause the problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[schwan]

You've got a poor connection somewhere. I had a similar problem and I spent hours trying to find it... Never could, brought it to the dealer, they found it right away. I'd say turn it on and start wiggling every single connection. Mine was a wire that came loose in a harness. Look to see if any wires are corroded.

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[WolfpackRider]

Arrrrrgh! I think it was a bottle of sunscreen bumping on the kill switch. I'll update later if the problem doesn't come back.

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[schwan]

Ha, almost all of us have done this at some point

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[WolfpackRider]

Yep, it was the sunscreen.

schwan - You did help me find the problem. As I had my head up under the dash wiggling everything under there, I happened to look down the side between the wall and the driver seat and saw the sunscreen bottle touching the kill switch.

[zabooda]

The first thing I would do is bypass the kill switch unless you actually use it. I'm a safety guy but a key switch does just fine and is easy identifiable by others in the boat as a means to turn off an engine. I've been in situations where a malfunction of any kind would have put me in peril and I wouldn't want the kill switch to be the issue.

[WolfpackRider]

zabooda - that's exactly what I did! I'm pretty big on safety too, but I've never used the kill switch in 13 years. There are 4 prongs on the back of it. Two were connected, two weren't. The unused ones work in reverse - they are connected when the tab is removed. So, I just switched the connectors to those.

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