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Stalling from neutral going into fwd or reverse
Running into an issue with the late model Atomic 4 in our Pearson 30 and looking for some suggestions....
The engine starts reliably and without hesitation and runs smoothly. After what I believe is a satisfactory warm-up period, the engine will sometimes stall when shifting into gear. It will stutter very briefly before stalling and I can sometimes ‘catch’ it before it stalls by playing the throttle a bit. Once she’s in gear, she runs fine though I recently had a stall coming into the work dock at our club when backing down to neutral and shifting into reverse.
What I’ve checked thus far… I checked my plugs (new this season) for fouling and found only light soot. Since I use the engine pretty infrequently and it tends to run cool, I switched over Autolite 437s since they run a little hotter. I adjusted the fuel mixture screw a quarter turn clockwise (i.e. a little richer) – not much difference, but an additional quarter turn caused it to run a little rough so I backed it to its original position. I adjusted the idle a bit higher this morning, but am not convinced this is the underlying cause. Sitting on the mooring and backing down/moving forward on the pennant didn’t result in a stall, but I’m looking for some additional insight on this.
Could this be as simple as an idle adjustment? Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice.
-Chris
The engine starts reliably and without hesitation and runs smoothly. After what I believe is a satisfactory warm-up period, the engine will sometimes stall when shifting into gear. It will stutter very briefly before stalling and I can sometimes ‘catch’ it before it stalls by playing the throttle a bit. Once she’s in gear, she runs fine though I recently had a stall coming into the work dock at our club when backing down to neutral and shifting into reverse.
What I’ve checked thus far… I checked my plugs (new this season) for fouling and found only light soot. Since I use the engine pretty infrequently and it tends to run cool, I switched over Autolite 437s since they run a little hotter. I adjusted the fuel mixture screw a quarter turn clockwise (i.e. a little richer) – not much difference, but an additional quarter turn caused it to run a little rough so I backed it to its original position. I adjusted the idle a bit higher this morning, but am not convinced this is the underlying cause. Sitting on the mooring and backing down/moving forward on the pennant didn’t result in a stall, but I’m looking for some additional insight on this.
Could this be as simple as an idle adjustment? Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice.
-Chris
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