Okay so heres the fun stuff. I spent 2 years completely rebuilding my boat and doing some general maintenance to the engine. Now comes along trouble. Last year when I would run the engine it was a hard start-cranking 10-12 times before it would run, and then it would stall out after about 5 min at idle/or if I put any load on the engine: ie put it in gear. About 10 days ago I brought the boat out of storage to prep it for the cooler fall weather and florida's 2nd boating season. I noticed now that instead of 10-12 times to turn her over it was considerably more. Finally when she was running if I throttled the engine down any lower then half throttle, she would stall. No matter how long I would play with throttle controls it would stall. Furthermore I noticed that when running at full throttle (not in gear) the engine pitch would flux. My buddy and I began troubleshooting. <br />We have pretty much ruled out a few things...although maybe further testing would prove us wrong. <br /><br />We replaced the spark plugs. With new plugs in we noticed no change. Upon some examinations we noticed the solinoids for 2 of the cylinders were pretty badly cracked so we replaced those. When we did that...it got worse. Now the engine will crank maybe sputter for a second then quit. For some reason now for the first time also, she has been backfiring every once in a while, mainly if I crank her for more than 5-7 seconds or so. We then took off the carbs and they were both looking pretty much brand new. No build up or gunk. Floats were nice, seals looked good, all parts moved nicely. We reassembled them and thats where we're at now. Looising patience as seems to be the trend at every stage of the rebuild so far. Unfortunately I'm not a trained mechanic so everything we have done has been a "learn as you go, hope you dont break it" experience. Hopefully we haven't broken it and someone out there can give me some suggestions as to what it could possibly be. I had a few ideas maybe Im way off, please let me know what you think.<br /><br />1. Bad gas tank/line- goo in the tank/line causing poor fuel flow. The reason that any fuel issues has been brought up--> right after I installed the new solinoid I had her run at full throttle once. Every time I heard the engine struggle I pushed in my electric choke for a second or so, she would die down just a bit more and then when I released the choke she would come back to life.<br /><br />2. Timing is off. Only began to think this after hearing her backfire <br /><br />3. Bad compression in at least 1 of the cylinders...but cant check for compression if I cant get her to run... or am I wrong about that?<br /><br />4. Pack went bad- so even with good coils-still no spark?<br /><br />Thats as much as I could think of without knowing more about anything. This engine is a hybrid of a few different 'rudes and may just be beat to hell and beyond all hopes. I have so far invested over 4grand into this boat and I really dont want to hear that...so any help at all would be so incredibly greatly appreciated 
. <br /><br />Thanks in advance <br /><br />Jay
. <br /><br />Thanks in advance <br /><br />Jay