Quote:
Originally Posted by XCR-700
I too have had problems several times with the ignition module inside the dist on my 23' Carlson 5.7 Mercury I/O with thunderbolt ignition.
Its a piece of JUNK as far as I am concerned and part of the reason that boat is down with a bad motor.
The module died while I was prepping it for winter and I thought well its good enough and I'll fix replace the module again (3rd time for me) in the spring. Well I guess I didnt get enough coolent run through it and the motor got a freeze crack,,,
What really got me was that the motor had very low hours and ran GREAT otherwise. Errrr
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XCR-
Food for thought. When I winterize my boat I completely drain the block and manifolds of as much water as I possibly can, then backfill with antifreeze, the RV/Marine stuff since it's non-toxic. Now I'm not sure where the drains are on the 5.7, but the 4.3 I have has a total of 5 drain plugs. One on either side of the engine block, one on the bottom of each manifold and one just below the water pump next to the fuel/water separator.
Once I have all the raw water drained out I put the plugs back in then remove the top side of the coolant hoses on the front of the engine. They all come together onto what looks like a distribution point, I think (going off memory here) there are 4 total, two that are small and two that are large. Anyways I backfill the engine block by pouring the antifreeze into those hoses till they are full. One of the smaller hoses goes directly to the stern drive so after pouring antifreeze into that hose for a bit you can hear it dripping coming out the raw water intake. When I do this I already have the boat and trailer in the garage and up on jack stands with the stern drive as far down as it'll go without hitting the floor. I store it all winter like that. Never had any freeze up problems and I can tell how much antifreeze is in the engine block and manifolds based on how much I put in which is usually at least 2-3 gallons. Now some say you can just drain the engine, manifolds and that's good enough, maybe but any untreated water left over will freeze and depending on where it is could cause problems so I figure it better to be safe than sorry. Antifreeze is cheap, engine blocks or stern drives not so much!
Oh I forgot the most important part!! All that water and what little antifreeze may spill into the bilge should be cleaned up - then optionally wax the bilge so it's nice an pretty to look at
