Well I am at my wits end with this one.<br />I have a 71 Johnson 60, hydroelectric shift. The lower unit blew, forward gear stripped out and took the pinion gear with it. Prior to this it had no shifting problems, electrically.<br /> I obtained a used lower unit, from a 68 Evinrude Triumph, which was a short shaft. I took the long shaft from my blown unit and swapped it over. Gears and clutch dog looked good so I went with em....Before doing any work, I metered out the solenoids, and both were within the 5-7 ohm spec... no problem right? Wrong....<br />Installed the new unit, fired it up, pumping water, forward gear only, no neutral no reverse...ok we got a shift mechanism problem here.<br />Remove unit, remove solenoids, looks like a hack job, the blue wire had been pinched and crushed on a previous repair, and when I removed the entire assembly, I found the shift rod bent badly, and someone had done a hack repair on it.<br />Moreover, these solenoids were different than the ones in the original unit. <br />On the 68 Evinrude unit, the bad solenoids are installed with a series of springs below and between them. There is no external shift rod casing as in my 71, there was simply a narrow shift rod extending through both solenoids. and at the bottom the arrangement is also differnt, instead of the narrow rod that indexes in to the pump, there is a nylon socket, with a plunger with a ball on the end.. This nylon socket was JB welded on to the shift rod, so clearly someone hacked it. this plunger appears to be inserted in to the pump. <br /><br />So... long story I know..... can one of you OMC experts tell me if this is the correct arrangment on this lower end? I was surprised since my Seloc manual makes no mention of one of these units having a different solenoid/shift rod arrangment than the one I have. Is this spring loaded set up standard? More importantly, can my good solenoids from my 71 unit be used in place of the setup on the 68 unit? I rather suspect not, since the hole in which you insert the shift rod appears different, making me think the pump is different too and will be a no go. <br />I guess the good news is I got forward gear now...trying to look at the bright side. <br />And, I suppose I should ask if I need to pull the pump out of the bad unit, check it out, and use that with my good solenoids?<br /><br />Tearing my hair out on this one.... <br /><br />Thank you<br />Craig
