Most absurd statement by Honda dealer. You won't believe this!

[HopCar]

"It's in neutral when you don't grab any throttle, but there's no other way to select it. Drop down the RPMs and you're in neutral, if that makes sense. "
Thanks Rebel. Sounds like a centrifugal clutch that engages as RPM increase.

[daddle]

Running it dry daily sounds foolish. For a week or if storing below certainly a good idea.

That alcohol fuel certainly does not seem as explosive -- hard starting.

Fun game: on that last trip out to he boat before cruising away try to guess how far away to disconnect the fuel hose so you just make it there. About 100m for me.

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by downunder

Cellulosic fermentation ethanol is the holy grail of ethanol production which will reduce costs dramatically allowing it to compete as a fuel without subsidies. This however is still in development and whilst there may be many different technologies being developed there are none at full commercial stage yet to my knowledge.

They are still at genetically modifying the type of tree they selected for this. The goal is to make it easy for bacteria to get the cellulose out of the wood. But it sounded like they are close to finished with that.. Or can improve along the way. Then they will need to start planting etc. so it's many years away still.

[goboatingnow]

i wont touch the small 4 stroke Honda engines, nasty engines, hard to start and finicky. Yamaha all the way. i recently took a small 4 stroke out of my garage, not been used for 6 years, put away just after a fresh water flush. started on first pull of the cord. Thats how its supposed to work!.

There is no substitute.

Dave

[dirkdig]

Agree, my 2 hp honda is a big pain.

Always something going on with it.

[onestepcsy37]

we have 2 and 4 stroke small engines at my sailing club. interesting to see their performance after you shut off the fuel source with the engine running.

the 2 strokes die in about a minute. the 4 strokes take maybe three minutes. guess if miles per gallon were very important i'd go with a 4 stroke....

[Captain Bill]

Originally Posted by over40pirate

After buying a 2.3 hp 4 stroke honda, and realizing it didn't seem to have enough power, my friend took it to a Honda dealer for warranty repair.
When he picked it up, they charged him $90 to clean the carb.
They told him, he needed to use aviation fuel in it!!!!!!!!
That would be convienent for a cruiser!

I tried the avgas route once because I was having so much trouble with ethanol gas in my outboard. It didn't work very well. Avgas is not traditional gasoline and has different vapor pressure characteristics as well as a lot of lead. Using avgas, the motor was very hard to start and didn't seem to put out as much power. I attribute this to the fixed carb jets in modern outboards. The jets are set up for conventional gasoline, not avgas. Airplanes have adjustable mixture controls so they do not have this issue. I did find that a 50/50 mix of avgas and ethanol gas seemed to do better than straight of either one. Avgas is mostly toluene and if you look at the ingredients in most spray carb cleaner, it's toluene. With the 50/50 mix I never once had to clean the crud out of the carb.

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

i wont touch the small 4 stroke Honda engines, nasty engines, hard to start and finicky. Yamaha all the way. i recently took a small 4 stroke out of my garage, not been used for 6 years, put away just after a fresh water flush. started on first pull of the cord. Thats how its supposed to work!.

There is no substitute.

Dave

Agree. I just picked up a 1982 Yamaha 5hp that has done a lot of work over the years and it starts first pull!

[zeehag]

my honda 2 that i got with this boat ws such a pita i gave it away for cheepo and bought a nissan 3.5. now, that was a good engine......

now i use a torqueedo 1003t.....lol.....easy and cheap to run--even comes with own solar panel.....

[Kettlewell]

Here's another vote for putting marine StaBil (the blue stuff) in every tank of gas before I pump into the tank. I've been doing this since forever and I have not had a problem with ethanol, even after the outboard sits all winter long in storage. I do the same with my motorcycle and it starts right up after being stored for six months with a full tank of gas and the carb full when shut down.

However, the tiny passages inside a 4-stroke carb are more likely to get plugged by the teensiest pieces of crud, no matter what you do, so get used to cleaning carbs more often. It has nothing to do with ethanol--usually a piece of crud that has evaded the filters will lodge in the low-speed jet, which is just tiny. An auxiliary fuel filter is mandatory with 4-stroke outboards.

[s/v 'Faith']

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

Agree. I just picked up a 1982 Yamaha 5hp that has done a lot of work over the years and it starts first pull!

Just picked up a brand new Yamaha 4hp 2 stroke outboard at Abaco Yacht Services in the Bahamas. Wonderful little motors! I bought it for the dingy on the boat I have been cruising aboard for the last 6 months, I have carried my long used yamaha 3hp on the trip but could not pass up the opportunity for a new shiny one.

[ReMetau]

I don't have a Honda, but with my 4 stroke, I use Startron all the time and burn off the gas when not using daily.

[Cormorant]

Captain Bill's remark above about toluene in avgas got me wondering what the ingredients in SeaFoam are. I thought maybe that has toluene. Turns out it's naptha that does the cleaning. Same for Marvel Mystery Oil and Sta-bil, though Sta-bil has about 5% of a proprietary ingredient added, some sort of phenolic anti-oxidant.

Just an interesting sidebar. . . . Here's a link to a guy who made his own homebrew SeaFoam lifting the general recipe from the SeaFoam MSDS:
Homebrew Sea Foam (SeaFoam) Motor Treatment Recipe

[Sailor_Hutch]

Originally Posted by rebel heart

I had good luck with the Sta-bill fuel stabilizer. Probably had about 4 month old gas in there chugging through without any problems. I'm on Mexican gas now so I think I'm free of ethanol but I still put stabilizer into the 5 gallon jerry can when I take it to get filled. Both my Honda 2000 generator and Honda 2.x outboard are happy as little clams.

A guy I know ran a small motor repair shop, and claimed a quarter of his business was picking the gel/varnish gas out of carburator orifices. When I was there, he pointed me to the high-end Sta-Bill product - which was supposed to be good for about nine months ...

He said the last thing small motor manufacturers do is burn a shot of avgas, to test the engines ...

[HopCar]

Of course all you guys could avoid the gasoline ethanol problems by running your small outboards on propane like I do.