Heres a story for you guys! It demonstrates obessive stupidity!
Well I went for my first 8x8 test drive. Wow an adventure it was. The area I wanted to test it in open water on had frozen over a bunch over night, but there was open water on the river. The worst part is the guy didnt have the plugs with him and I mainly wanted to test it out on open water to get a feel for it. So we attempted to make some plugs out of wood with a pocket knife!! Not so smart, for a 12 degree day and a hard to access river point.
The machine was awesome, we ended up dumping it off the edge of 6 inches ice into the river and fired up the mud motor. We didnt go far as there was alot of ice and one of our plugs was leaking to much water, good thing as I got to see the bilge pumping full time! We did start sweating when we couldnt get out. You guys are right, they are slow even with an 6 horse outboard. Our real adventure happened when we couldnt get out! We had to winch up a bridge embankment to get it out, and it was just short of a vertical climb with a foot of snow. We made her out, I wish I had pictures as we really pushed the limit. Once we were out of the water, that sucker just cruized up the vertical embankment with out the winch, and we ended up with about 10 or 15 gallons of water pooled up in the back! Close call, but quite exciting, as least I hadnt bought the rig yet if it had sank!
The machine was amazing and it certainly showed me the capabilities! It all looked very clean on the inside, however there was one issue with shifting it into gear. Some times you would have to almost grind it into gear, almost like the idle was to high. Could that be a belt tension issue? The idle seemed pretty reasonable to me, not enough to throw off shifting into gear. Your input would be great. Or could it also be a tranny issue?
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