I cranked my little 1981 25 hp Mercury out on the lake after it had been stored for a few months and it fired up nicely. It always starts and runs good. I then noticed it would only run at idle speed (or a little faster) at full throttle. At first, I thought it might be a carb problem. I later started thinking it might be a throttle cable problem because the throttle felt a little tighter than usual. I don't know if you guys know what these are, but in Arkansas we have whats called mud daubers. They're like bees or wasps...they have a stinger and they're a flying insect. But daubers build mud ball type nests on things and they dry hard. There are always a bunch of mud daubers in the barn I store my boat in. My cowling has a little busted place and that's all it takes for the mud daubers to get in. I'm going to bondo the spot when I get time. I started wondering if there was a mud dauber nest under the motor cowling. So I took the cowling off and sure enough, there was more than one nest and there were some around the throttle parts. At this point, I'm thinking I probably damaged the throttle cable because I was putting pressure on it in a bad way with the dauber nests wedged in the throttle area. The throttle got to where it would do nothing different when I tried to speed up or slow down. It just maintained the same forward slow speed. When I looked under the cowling, the pully part of the throttle system looked like the cables wasn't tight against the pully. I tried to take the elbow plate loose where the tiller handle attaches to the motor but the screws were so tight that they wanted to strip. Anyone know if that's possibly where my biggest problem is? Probably got the cables twisted and wadded up in there?
