CATransplant
Admiral
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2005
- Messages
- 6,319
For the folks who have been helping me since February, I wanted to post what happened on today's lake test.<br /><br />First, this Johnson RDS-20 is attached to a Glastron V147 tri-hull. As you might guess, this is a 14' 7" fiberglass boat. Dry weight is about 700 lb.<br /><br />After following all the advice here, including an impeller change and removal of the flywheel to replace a broken key, rewiring the console, and a bunch of other minor things, I finally put the boat in the lake this afternoon. My wife was along, along with the 6 gal. tank, the 5 hp kicker and its 2.5 gal tank. I'd guess we had about 400 lb in the boat, altogether, bringing the total weight to about 1100 lb.<br /><br />Success!! The old 35 fired right up. I let it warm up a couple of minutes, then we slowly moved out of the no wake zone.<br /><br />I gradually moved the throttle to WOT (well, not that gradually). The boat went on plane almost instantly, with very little bow rise at all. A friend was along, with his shiny new boat. By his GPS, we hit and held 23 mph, running flat out at WOT. As far as I'm concerned, that's better than I expected as far as speed goes, and will take me around the local lakes just fine.<br /><br />The engine ran perfectly, without a cough or a miss, throughout the entire RPM range, even ticking down to a nice even idle...slow enough for trolling.<br /><br />We ran the boat around the lake for about an hour, mixing WOT runs with a lot of maneuvering and some slow speed stuff, just to see if the engine would load up at idle.<br /><br />Bottom line is that, THANKS TO THE HELP of everyone here who was kind enough to answer my beginner's questions, this motor is running like a new one, after 48 years!<br /><br />I can't thank everyone enough, and I will continue to visit here regularly to offer any help I can to others.
