Ted, my mistake :lolhit: i missed the (-) part of your first comment. you are correct, that will work.

cash, is you interrupt not engaging while you have it running on muffs out of the water? usually the interrupt wont activate out of the water. all it does is intantly cut power to unload the drive and release the dog gears in the drive. the interrupt works off of a little resistance on the lower shift cable while trying to pull the drive out of gear. the resistance goes away once out of gear, so the switch deactivates since there is no "pull" on the shift cables. The switch only works when the dogs are loaded (ie prop turning in the water). try it in the water, it should work fine.

Okay, will try looking at it in the water next time. :)

if it came out of gear the last time you used it, its working. you won't be able to get the drive out of gear if its not working. trust me, you would have found out as soon as you backed off the trailer and went to shift from rev to forward. you would end up pulling real hard on the shifter and it would go straight from forward to reverse. the only way it comes out of gear is to release the tension (instantaneously cut power to the engine) on the dog clutch to make it release. do that a few too many times and your drive becomes a really expensive anchor.

Determined to figure it out this year. Last year I could only go from forward to reverse, nuetral was only available if I started the engine. Ugh. Obnoxious.

First on grounding the coil with the shift cutout, it is not a dead short as the coil has a resistance around .8 ohms. This equates to about 15amps and is only momentary as the unit shifts.

There is no detent in the shift mechanism in the lower unit, the dog just goes from forward through neutral into reverse. The detent is in the shifter. Make sure that when the shifter is in neutral, the dog is adjusted so that it is in the middle of its travel (not very close to forward or reverse).

If it shifts fine while running isn't that what really matters? Why are you shifting it without it running? The clutch dog will engage forward or reverse with everything turning better than it will not running. If the cutout is not working, you could almost break the shifter off trying to pull it out of gear.

Also, if the cable is worn/stretched it can make shifting difficult and should be replaced.

Hope this helps your situation.

So for the shift cutout switch... run one wire to ground, and the other to the negative side of the coil, which is IN the HEI cap. Right?

I know. It's adjusted properly, in terms of the cables. The issue is right now I don't have the interrupt switch hooked up to anything... so if I put it in neutral, I can start the boat, then slam it into forward, but once in forward I can never hit neutral again. This is all because I don't have an interrupt switch, so when I pull it out of forward it requires enough force that it jumps right into reverse.

It actually isn't THAT bad. But it's not how it should be.

Yeah, mercuiser style cutout should go from engine ground to negative side of coil (whether integral to the distributor or a separate coil).

On my motor (1986) there is a 2 lug bar beneath the cutout switch that the 2 wires from the cutout switch go to. One of these screws is already grounded to the engine so don't hook the coil to this one or the coil will always be grounded and the engine won't start (coil will get very hot too with key on). Not sure if you have this type of setup.

Got it.

Like this?

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y14...ingdiagram.jpg

There are only two wires on my HEI dizzy, run and tach. So I'm guessing that the tach is the ground wire?

That is correct.