Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

[Bluesmoke]

Sorry to drag out the tired old question but here goes : I have a vintage Elgin with the serial number of 571.59641 . It is cream coloured with batwings on the fiberglass hood, has a separate fuel tank, 2 stroke, 2 cylinder, forward-neutral-reverse, it has some sort of throttle lock out with settings as follows : 7 1/2 - lock - Max .
What year is my motor ?

Also...

It has run strong as a kicker, and has pushed a dead 70 hp Force attached to a 16' Bayliner Mutiny back onto the trailer. Lately I put it on a 12 foot tin boat and could not get past 1/4 throttle without the prop losing bite and the rpm going through the roof and the boat falling back to a dead stop. When i throttle back down to near stall speed and rev up again, away we go...sort of slowly, and sometimes i can roll on the throttle slowly and get up half way to plane!
I am a little unclear how much of the prop should be clear under the stern transom area ? I don't have a cavitation plate on the motor but I am guessing that the first little horizontal fin above the prop should be about on the same horizontal line as the underside of the boat ?

Any help the forum has to offer would be great, if I can get my wife to catch the boating itch i might get to have a real boat someday. Sorry if this is a little disjointed, it is late and i have a touch of insomnia.

Thanks all,
B.S.

 

[F_R]

Re: Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

You have a 1961 18 horsepower made by West Bend (later called Chrysler). Surely you have an anti-cvitation plate. It is the flat plate above the prop. It should be below the bottom of the boat. You may (probably) have a slipping propeller hub, assuming the motor is low enough in the water.

The throttle lock was so you could trust your kids with it. A Sears gizmo.

 

[Bluesmoke]

Re: Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

Thanks for the quick reply !
Sorry about the confusion, there is the factory cast aluminum plate that is part of the lower leg, but I have seen a bit of discussion about adding after-market plates to motors ( newer models I'm sure ) and mine is all stock.

There appears to be an intake/exhaust molded into the underside of the joint between the lower unit and upper unit, and I have been assuming that it needs to be submerged as well. It is about 4 inches above the top of the cav plate and is about 6 small holes (1/4") on either underside of the joint of the two housings.It looks like it is for water, and I am assuming that the motor is water cooled. Am I way off base here ?

Another question, Do I need to open up the lower unit and pack it with grease? Is there a volume of oil in the leg that I should change out ? I know that 2 strokes get top end lube from the oil mixed in fuel, and I can see what looks like a drain plug for the leg, but I can't see anywhere to get oil back into the leg?

I will try and post pics of the creamy little beast later, in all its batwing glory !

Finally : Does anyone know where to get a manual for this thing ?

Thanks for all your expert advice that I hope comes flooding in .
B.S. (BlueSmoke)

 

[CATransplant]

Re: Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

You can also find additional information at the Elgin Outboard site:

http://www.elginoutboards.org/

 

[tmcalavy]

Re: Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

If there is only a drain screw on the gearcase and not a drain and vent screw, just take the drain screw out and put the oil in there until it won't take any more, then replace the screw. Not familiar with the 60's Elgins, but earlier models were water cooled, so those holes up from the cavitation plate on the back of the leg may be where the mist from cooling water is supposed to exit. If you don't see some spray there the water pump/impeller is probably shot...don't run it that way, pull the LU and replace the pump/impeller.

 

[F_R]

Re: Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

Surely there must be two oil screws. Look again. It has to be water cooled, that's way bigger than any air cooled. I believe they probably have generic manuals here at iboats that cover West Bend and Chrysler. Maybe not that old though.

Waiting for those pictures so we can give more intelligent answers.

 

[Bluesmoke]

Re: Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

Here are some pics of the cream coloured, smoke belching, batwinged beast :

!!!? oops. Sorry the 1.4 megapixel files are too big for the site to allow me to post ?! I will have to create a Flickr account and paste the link.

I did pull the prop and find a rubber tubular bushing on the final drive but I can't get it off the driveshsaft. The prop retaining nut which puts pressure on the bushing to cause it to have friction between shaft and prop seems to thread on all the way to the end of the threads, without tightening to a point where there is no slip in the prop.

Hard to gauge how much slip as I have one hand holding the flywheel and one hand hauling on the prop. Before I removed the prop I could turn about 10% of a turn of the prop with the flywheel locked in place ( this did not seem right!). There was some aluminum oxide inside the prop and on the bushing and I wonder if a good clean of the bushing and prop so as to be sticky rubber against shiny metal would do the trick ? Or should I try a shim between the bushing and prop, so that the nut has more travel on the threads ?

Also I keep getting my emails bounced from the Elgin.org site and the A DeKalb site!

Any thoughts folks?
Thanks,
B.S.

 

[F_R]

Re: Help! My vintage Elgin is a mystery to me ?

That does not sound right. Some old, smaller motors had a rubber or plastic cone in the prop that could be tightened with the nut, but I seriously doubt that your 18 was that way. I assume that hub was pressed in the prop at the factory and should not be coming out. That's the way almost all motors were made till just recently. If it is coming out as you describe, it certainly is slipping....very badly.

Yes, the prop should rotate back and forth when in gear, without moving the flywheel. That's by design so you can "catch" the spinning gears when shifting.