fall service on a four stroke outboard, and the thing about running it dry

your list is the list. two things from the bench side.

the gear lube in the fall is the single most valuable thing on there and it is not because of the lube. when you pull that drain screw you are reading the seal. clean and honey colored, you are done. milky or the color of coffee with cream, you have water in the housing, and if you leave that in there over a Wisconsin winter it freezes, expands, and cracks the case or wipes a bearing. we cut open two every spring from people who did their lube in april. one of them was a 2019 with 240 hours on it.

same reason to do it in the fall even if the lube is fine, you have five months to get a seal kit and a shop appointment instead of finding out on opening weekend when every shop within sixty miles is three weeks out.

running it dry is two stroke advice from carburetor days and it hurts a modern EFI motor. the fuel in a four stroke rail is what keeps the injectors and the high pressure pump wet. run it out and you leave varnish in the injectors and you can cook the fuel pump doing it. leave the treated fuel in it. that is the whole answer.

fogging on a fuel injected four stroke, the manual for your motor will tell you whether it wants it and how. some want it through the intake, some do not want it at all. do what your book says, not what the guy at the landing says. concrete floor thing is a myth from when battery cases were tar and rubber, but a bench is easier on your back anyway.

question from the cheap seats. my boat lands in about two weeks and it goes straight into storage without me ever putting it in the water, which feels like a strange way to start.

the fuel question. every station around Fargo is 10 percent ethanol unless i drive out to a non oxy pump, which there are two of. does it matter enough to haul six gallon cans, and how long does treated pump gas actually keep. i have heard thirty days and i have heard two years from people who both sounded sure.

adding the boat half, since the motor is only part of what freezes.

pull the drain plug and leave it out, and hang it somewhere you will find it in may. water sitting in the bilge area of a pontoon deck between the tubes is how bunk boards and deck plywood rot from below.

if you leave it on the lift, crank it high, and take the canopy cover off after the first hard freeze or the first wet snow will fill it and bend the frame. i have replaced two canopy frames for neighbors who left the cover on through a November snow. a canopy is a roof, it is not a snow load rated roof.

mice. steel wool in the console opening, and take every crumb and every rope out of the storage lockers. i had a family move into a bench seat one winter and they chewed the wire loom for the nav lights, which is a fun thing to discover at dusk.

i pay the marina 310 dollars to do all of this and i am not embarrassed about it. i am 71 and i do not want to be on my back on a cold slab with gear lube running down my wrist.

what i would say to anybody who pays somebody else: ask for the old gear lube in a jar, or at least ask them what it looked like. one year mine came back with the note that the port drain was slightly cloudy and they had done it twice. that is the same information bill is talking about, you just have to ask for it instead of assuming the invoice line means somebody looked.