Hey guys, just reminded me to post a recent experience. Agree on the cleaning first as most mechanics swap out unnecessarily and if they don't re-align the drive properly you'll have other problems later.
My last issue was a new one on me after 7 years so might be helpful for anyone finding this thread in future.
I had the engine pulled for some work this year and while the leg was off I got them to replace the trim sender as it was getting a bit wild. Would normally clean but just less hassle at the time.
When she came back the trim switch on the throttle only worked one way, no trim up anymore although trailor button and transom switch worked fine.
After days of troubleshooting the shop concluded that it was a faulty trim switch and wanted to swap out the whole throttle assembly. I left it as didn't want to loose the original Mariah fitting and thought that i might be able to source a new switch eventually.
A few weeks later it suddenly started working again and was fine for a couple of weeks, then next service dead again. So figured it wasn't the switch and that there was a loose connection somewhere in the engine bay that they had disturbed, sure enough after a few weeks back it came and a few weeks later off it went again.
Anyway to cut a very long story short, I had a different engineer inspect and re-align the leg (gimble bearing had been fitted the wrong way by first!) and as he was re-fitting the drive he found that the starboard fixing bolt had been cross threaded and no longer tightened down.
This bolt has a kind of hex nut head and the trim limiter slots into it so that it knows how far up and down the drive is. As the bolt was loose it would occasionally rotate a little through vibration, sometimes activating the limit, sometimes not, hence the switch not working and the long periods of time with and without the issue. The system was working fine, just the physical connection was messed up.
They must have cross threaded during the original work and and just left it, not surprising if they were incompetent enough to have the gimble bearing back to front and the drive miss-aligned!
It's a really unlikely one, but if you've tried everything else with the senders and you get a problem that sounds like this, it might save you a few hours tracing for faulty wiring
Steve.
Re: trim guage malfuction?
