stevevp

Seems to have been. She ran for almost 4 hours yesterday with no problem. Fingers crossed for the next run - I'm leaving the strimmer cord onboard just in case!

Just to say very many thanks for all the advice received through this site. I tried the strimmer cord (having rounded the end off first) and can report it cleared the blockage and I was able to enjoy my first run out of the year. A good £3.50 fix!

Will do, many thanks. Will do, many thanks. I'm hoping this is an easy fix.

Very many thanks. I'll give it a go.

Thanks, from the top or the bottom?

Mine is about 9999% cleaner than yours! It's fairly clean externally including the grilles, I just don't know what's got inside. I'll try and get the boat turned round and have a closer look.

Alain, Many thanks for your message, I do appreciate the effort. On the pipe, it is rubber and I can barely reach the top end. I guess access to the bottom end requires something to be taken off? Whilst I do have the owners manual, it does not cover this. I can't find the list you mention to the workshop manual on the honda uk or jp websites. I have searched. I appreciate the need to be self-sufficient but I'm happy to pay someone to fix it if they know what they are doing. It's much cheaper than me breaking something! As far as I can see, with the engine tilted, the intake is not bloked although there was quite a lot of algae/weed on it which I allowed to dry and have brushed off. As mentioned, there is some initial flow of water from the check hole and the engine did not overheat after 10 minutes running. Steve

Thanks for your reply but I wouldn't know how to access the pipe at the engine end. It's not question of lazyness but mechanical incompetence and a tendency to break things, however careful and wellmeaning! I'd rather pay someone to do it properly. PS. I don't have a workshop manual and the user manual doesn't have diagrams.

Just a quick bump on this in case any one knows of someone in the Milton Keynes area who can help with this. I've just run the engine for 10 minutes with no overheating warning. The water came out the top vent for about a minute and then stopped. Poking a paperclip in the vent to clear it didn't help. Many thanks.

Thanks for your reply. The engine does tilt but when I pull the boat backwards into my u-shaped mooring, it bottoms out before the (raised) engine is over dry land. I can attest to the canal being a fairly unpleasant place to be standing up in! I've checked and I do have a temperature warning light. Perhaps I should let the engine run and see if it cuts out. I guess 10 minutes would be more than enough if it was going to overheat? Grateful advice on this. I'm really not mechanically competent to work on the engine myself and have a history of breaking things when I try (not this engine). I'm also not able to lift the engine off the boat. The last time it came off it was a two man job and I wasn't either of them!

Again, thank you all for your advice, I do appreciate it. I'm sadly out of my depth with all this! I will check to see if there is a temperature warning light on the remote - I thought there was only oil pressure - either way, it's almost impossible to see in daylight. Is the warning light the only way to confirm the engine is cooling without the tell-tale? If I run the engine on the mooring, how long would it take to overheat? One person who looked at the boat has said the pipe is blocked as he can't blow through it. He suggests blowing it through with a compressor but I'm concerned that it will burst something. I'd rather pay for an expert eg to check the impeller if I can find one. One thing that doesn't help is the location of my mooring which necessitates getting into the water to do any work, albeit at the shallow end of the basin!

Thanks for your replies. The impeller was changed about 18 months ago and, for various reasons, the engine has been run for less than 10 hours since - the boat has not moved at all this year because of travel and my failure to sort out the coolant issue. I've not started the engine with the prop out of the water - I've assumed I shouldn't.

Can anyone please recommend someone to sort out a blockage in the cooling system on my Honda BD-15D outboard. I've repeatedly cleared the outlet hole but the water just stops again after a few seconds. I'm on the Pennyland Marina, Milton Keynes (MK15). Many thanks.

I've had a problem this year with a small amount of water collecting in the central storage cubby (aft deck, below the floor, just outside the cabin door). The water is probably a maximum of 10mm deep and gathers only in the centre, low point, of the cubby. When I vacuum it out it's probably 0.5l max. It's a filthy brown colour. It doesn't get any deeper. The water seems to come from the cut out where the water pipe from the shower drain passes through to the pump, but given the lack of use that pipe gets (the boat is hardly used and is not live aboard) and the colour of the water, I don't think it's from there. Following a post on the Viking Owner's forum I got this advice: "First of all, if it is a sloping floor it is likely to be the hull itself. Don't go anywhere near it with a drill unless you want to replace a small leak with a huge one. The fact that the water is very dirty suggest that it may have traveled quite some way, picking up dirt as it went. The actual leak is probably due to a leaky window, hull fitting or small cracks in the gunwale.This could be some way from cubby hole." The reply dissuades me from my suggestion to drill a small hole in the bottom of the cubby to check for water under the floor! This is all exceeds my competence level. Can anyone please suggest someone who would travel to Milton Keynes to advise what to do and/or repair. Many thanks.