So you can't find neutral

[domenic]

Do you find you have to play with the throttle to find neutral? This will take the guessing out of it. On the bottom of the handle is a little screw. To get to it, you might have to take the throttle off the bolt. When you take the little screw out, you should find a spring. On top of the spring should be a little ball the size of a BB. These wear fast, and fall out. The way they work, is when you push the throttle in the area of neutral, the ball slips into a little half hole on the top of the unit.

I buy the little balls at a hardware store. Keep some on your boat…they fall out all the time.

[ILikeRust]

That really depends on the individual boat, and what's causing neutral to be hard to find.

On my boat, I don't have the detent you're describing. My gear shift is just a lever connected by a heavy cable to the shifter on the back end of the Atomic 4. Neutral is in between forward and reverse - that's all there is to it.

[Mo]

I have neutral marked with tape on the binnacle. There is a piece of yellow tape as wide as the shifter handle. To do this I moved the shifter handle until the shaft stopped turning then stuck the tape on to show exactly where it is. Next I put green, which turns out to be a longer strip of tape for forward on my boat. I push down for forward. Red is above the yellow and that is reverse. Use whatever colors you like but you will know where you are.

[domenic]

Most shifters are connected by cable. I have not heard of a company that builds a shifter without means of knowing when your in Neutral? The last owner of my boat did not know about the ball. I knew it had to have something, so I took it apart.

[BunnyPlanet169]

Bristol did

Original shifter was a SouthCoast winch head wannabe, and neutral was the happy dead zone between Forward, and pulling back to Reverse.

New Edson shifter has detent, which is oriented by first finding the happy dead zone and adjusting the cables and linkage to match.

IMHO if you've used a standard transmission as your daily-driver, the A4 neutral is pretty obvious by feel.... You could even argue a strong detent could mask linkage mis-adjustment, and you'd be better off without it.