mustangmark

Last spring I chased a strange shifting problem for months! The shifter is a commander 3000 and the drive is a bravo 1 (so you guy's know what's in there). This is what I was experiencing. Any movement of the shifter above 1/2 throttle would cause the shifter lever to bind up when I would try to bring it back down into neutral and I would have to turn the motor off, shift into neutral than start the boat back up to idle w/o being in gear. Not exactly safe! The strange part was that if I only went to 1/2 throttle on the shifter then brought it back down into neutral.....it was hit and miss. Sometimes it would be fine and other times it would bind up.
I spent so much time researching and attempting to fix this problem it was unreal! I bought the tools to check and make the adjustments on the cables, thought it was one of the shift cables at one point then believed it was the other, suspected that the lower cable to the drive was binding because I hadn't put it back exactly how it had come out when I had done the shift cable billows boot while I was fixing the gimble ring and then after that thought it was the control box going bad..............
I did finally figure out what the problem was and why it was happening. I did a lot of upgrades to my boat over the winter. One of which was a pretty big stereo system that a friend and I installed. One part of the install that I had my buddy help me out with was the installation and routing of all of the speaker wires from the speakers to the amps. My amps are located under the bow and I have six 6.5 inch mids in different locations throughout the boat. What he had done was zip tied all the speaker wires to both my control cables approx. every 4 inches all the way up to the control box.
When you shift a commander 3000 each cable will pivot one direction or the other right outside of the control box. Depending on how much throttle you give the boat also depends on how far the cables will pivot. By zip tying my speaker wires to both the control cables we lost the ability for those cables to pivot the way that they are designed to which was causing the "binding" that I was experiencing.
In the end, I had to remove the drivers seat, rear bench seat and a side panel again, cut a ton of zip ties out and ended up mounting the speaker wires (with far less zip ties) to only one of the control cables.
Anyways, I thought I would write my "novel" and hope that it may help someone out in the future if they run into the same problem.