Blueabyss

About a month ago My old faithful Bay Boat. suddenly stalled while on plane and would not restart. Would crank over fine but no start. Checked Lanyard, Flipped it back and forth and nothing. No tools to help diagnose so was towed in. First tow in 8 years. Messed with it some the next day and finally installed a new coil, which was on the boat all along, and it fired right up. Six trips later and boat quit about 200 yards from dock. Wind was blowing that day and actually blew us back to the dock. I googled crank no start and all sorts of BS came up. Next day I decided to check power at coil. Volt meter pos on coil to neg on battery. 12v. Googled how to bypass lanyard and only outboard crap came up. No help. Finally figured out if lanyard is off then there is no 12 v at coil. So there is no need to bypass lanyard switch if you have 12v at coil. Still no start. Now getting late. "Dark" Noticed while cranking there are sparks jumping all around coil wire boot at coil to Pos coil terminal. Could not see that in sunlight. This is an MSD High output coil . Pulled boot off and while cranking lots of spark from coil tower to pos on coil. Checked coil wire with ohm meter and no resistance found. OL on meter. Bad coil wire. Got a cheap one from Advanced auto, installed and it fired right up. Never seen that before. When the coil went bad it was at dusk and I did not see any sparks then so I know that coil was bad and wire was ok at that point. So I had 2 different failures with same result within a month. Ordered all new plug wires and will keep a spare coil and wire on boat from now own. Hope this helps someone else.

SB

iTrader: (1)

Good info, here’s more.

Old worn ignition components (cap/rotor/wires/ or plugs) is the #1 coil killer.
Edit in: gaps over .040" are hard on ignition components no matter what the ignition company says. Over .050" is brutal on them. Take that to the bank.

#2 is MSD and other cheap china coils burning out on their own.

Blueabyss

Thanks SB. Cap and rotor are 1 yr old. Plugs 6 months old. Wires and coil are 6 yrs old so they are probably fighting each other. Will replace all wires tomorrow. MSD, well I have heard a lot of bad but I got 6 years out of it and it might be the wires that killed it. Hard to say.

Chris