Tach lead ( what wire)
 

Hey Guys any help I would appreciate it. I am on Vacation at the Jersey shore this week & I ran aground in sand bar while idling & luckily made it out but the starboard motor sucked in a ton of sand & got all clogged up & pumping no water. So I took off all the water lines & with a hose nozzle blew out all of the sand. On my boat ( 99 Eliminator Daytona cat twin HP 500's carbs ) It was a ***** to get to the far side between the side of the boat and the motor. Any way I put it all back together & everything works perfect
all but the tach. I must have pulled off the lead for the tach but I don’t know which wire it is. Can any one tell me which wire near the distributer is the tach lead or pick up? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Dave.

If I recall, it should be the brown wire.

It will be the Gray wire

Gray

Mark

Gray wire going to what? I see a gray wire & a purple wire that both go to the coil. Is this what you guys are talking about? If so the wire looks fine & connected. Hmm?

Make sure the main harness bullet connector is still firmly connected. The gray wire runs through that and then to the tach.

Blue thunder I think you are right. Everything on the distributer & coil all look good with no wires disconnected. I think when I was flushing out all of the sand I might have soaked the big bullet connector. I will try to disconnect it & dry it out with compressed air & the spray it with some white grease & reconnect it. If that does not work I am stumped. The only other thing I think it could be is if I got water
into the distributer & that is screwing up the tach but if that were the case I would think that the motor
would run poorly.

Well I thought blue thunder was correct but after taking wire harness & un plugging it & inspecting it everything looks great so I plugged it back in & still no tach on that motor. At this point I am going to have to switch the tach”s in the dash & see if the tach went bad & it is just a coincidence ( I doubt it , but I must rule this out ) & if the tach is not bad then the wire for the tach must have a break in it from either the motor getting to hot when I sucked up all that sand or I pinched it when I was tacking off all the hoses to get the sand out. My question is which wire does the tach read from? The grey wire going to one side of the coil? or I see two wires that go to the distributer & the are both white with different color stripes in them. I need to know what wire to look for that is damaged? Any help from a qualified expert that knows 100% what wire send's the signal for the tachometer. Thanks guys.

The tach reads from the grey wire to the coil.

Also, when the engine is running use a test light on the grey wire. Connect one end to a positive wire (ignition or anything powered up) and touch the other end to the grey wire. You're test light should flicker... No flicker and your tach wire is shorted somewhere...

Thanks Panther. Now when you say to test the grey wire when the motor is running if I put the tester at
the coil I would think that would be before the break in the wire. I should find it further away & test it there correct?