HELP any mechanics out there?
 

yesterday was out on the lake running the boat like i normally do then out of nowhere the boat starts backfiring thru the carb i lose power and the boat cuts off .. (1988 regal velocity built 454) try cranking the boat over to restart keeps backfiring and really hard to turn over like the timing was way off checked the dist. everything was tight ......getting gas ....getting spark... new full tank of 93 octane new water seperator anyone have any ideas?

whenever I get one that,s hard to crank the first thing I do is pull the plugs and give it a crank. watch for water coming out the plug holes.

timing chain jumped or valve hanging open/bent

New tank of fuel is always suspect. Did you take the new separator element off and dump it? If not, you might find that it's full of water.

What ignition system is on this boat?

I'm trying to remember if 88' had the plug-in iginition module or the box... The plug-in's were notorious for causing the exact probelm you're having. It was one of two things...water in the connection or the module went bad...

Otherwise it could be a multitude of things and it's hard to troubleshoot without actually seeing it happen.... Could even be a fuel pump issue and it's not getting enough fuel..or a bad coil.. list goes on...

Do a compression check first then look at the module

It wiped the distributer gear. The engine has a Bullet racing cam in it and he doesn't have the cam card as of now. Anybody familar with these cams and if a bronze gear is what is supposed to be run?

Rhut rhoo....

I'd call up bullet and ask them, in the meantime you have all that metal from the gear that has been running thru the engine.... May want to pull it out and check the bearings at minimum.

MSD makes a composite gear that is pretty good for fairly stock applications. The distributor gear problem is not too uncommon in pleasure boats, the gear is only splash oiled so at idle it runs pretty dry and most pleasure boats rack up a decent number of idle hours. You can have the distributor modified to provide the gear with constant oil by drilling a small hole in the body between the two lands and then another on the bottom of the body, this will include the gear in the pressurized lube system and guard against this failure in the future. The composite gear is nice because you don't have to worry about the debris if it fails, it won't harm anything. The bad news is that the bottom end needs to come apart because of the metal particles from the gear.

Intresting, I had a buddy with a couple year old wake board boat wipe the dist gear out, had no idea is was not super rare. Can you detail the mod to improve oiling? I will try to do that next time I get the chance to pull dist out.