How hard to replace reeds in 77 Mercury 1150?

[kungpaoshizi]

Still need to do several things to my engine, but if those don't work, I'll either have to rebuild the carbs or as I saw in one post (rough idle at low rpm, 650ish rpm usually results in sluggish decrease until engine stall) possibly replace the reeds?

I am committed to getting this engine back to par, and just wondering how difficult this is?
I know it involves tearing the block apart...

Thanks!

 

[Georgesalmon]

Re: How hard to replace reeds in 77 Mercury 1150?

Reeds are a bigish job. They don't fail a lot either. Just do all the other stuff first and you'll probably never have to find out about replacing the reeds. Lync and sync, rebuild carbs and fuel pump for sure before thinking about reeds. Did you do a compression test?

 

[Chris1956]

Re: How hard to replace reeds in 77 Mercury 1150?

Your reeds are inside the crankcase. As George said, they hardly ever fail. Carb rebuilds are a standard maintenance job. Reeds are not...

 

[kungpaoshizi]

Re: How hard to replace reeds in 77 Mercury 1150?

Well this makes me feel better
I'm hoping the other stuff (including a fuel pump rebuild) will help and squash the problem but I'm new to the engine so I'm investigating all possibilities.. the motor runs flawlessly from ~1100-WOT (5k rpms)..

As far as compression, the first shop I took it to said they were all from 170-185, is that metric measurements? Sounds like my cars compression rates lol.. (let alone I've not seen anyone else mention compression numbers that high..