Mercury Jet with frozen control

[moretools]

I have a 60/40 Mercury outboard jet on my river boat. I occasionally use it to fish in below freezing weather (this week). Under these conditions, the shift/throttle control freezes in position. If I turn the engine off and fish until the sun warms things up, it works fine. I tried spraying WD-40 into the cables as best as I could, without taking it apart, last fall. This hasn't helped. If it was water in the cable wouldn't it have evaproated since the boat was stored 3 months ago? If it was water that didn't evaporate, wouldn't it have rusted things up and completely trashed the cables? Am I looking in the wrong place?

 

[Lone Duck]

Re: Mercury Jet with frozen control

Do you have the shift cable hooked to the reverse bucket ? (some folks take the bucket off and run with no reverse) If you are using the reverse bucket that is where I would look because when using throttle, the shift cable moves in conjunction with it.

 

[moretools]

Re: Mercury Jet with frozen control

Thanks for the reply Lone Duck. As a matter of fact, I do have the reverse bucket connected. I'll check it next time.

While standing still the nozzle, bucket and most of the linkage is below water, is it a matter of this stuff freezing while motoring, which exposes most of it to air? Maybe what I think is the sun warming things is really the river melting the ice off things? Thanks again.

 

[Lone Duck]

Re: Mercury Jet with frozen control

Thanks for the reply Lone Duck. As a matter of fact, I do have the reverse bucket connected. I'll check it next time.

While standing still the nozzle, bucket and most of the linkage is below water, is it a matter of this stuff freezing while motoring, which exposes most of it to air? Maybe what I think is the sun warming things is really the river melting the ice off things? Thanks again.

Yes! I think that is the problem. You can do a few things to help this problem. Such as checking the height of the jet foot in relation to the bottom of the hull and how much spray you are getting over the leg. You can adjust the jet foot height and add a spray deflector just above the leading edge of the foot. Google (enhancing outboard jet performance ) there is a lot of good information there.