Whats the 1st thing to do when you work on your boat motor?

O

oteps

Senior Member
unhook battery. #2, throw all your tools under motor and make sure they are covered in gunk. Its gonna happen anyway. Outboard guys throw your tools in the pool then retrieve.
 
10mm sockets love to hide or skip town all together. Also, plenty of flat head screw drivers laying around just when you need them the least.
 
#1 Put any screws you remove into a container and then place that container in a special place so you won't loose them.

#2 Loose the container

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well, hope you guys are happy. Ya ll jinxed me. Alternator went out on my merc. Had to put a new one on. First one lasted 444 hours, this one lasted 434 hours. See a pattern here.

Anyway, i needed my 10mm ignition type wrench to hold the post nut while i tightened ring terminal down. Nowhere to be found. Ended up grinding down my 10mm open end so i can promptly loose it now.

Side note. I took the bad one to local alt shop. He said they could rebuild, but would be next week before it s ready. Got plans for the Fourth, so I went to local Merc Dealer and bought a new one. Told the Alt shop to go ahead and rebuild and in 444 hours, I m ready.

Whole point of story is in four years, I ll be looking everywhere for my spare alt.

If you guys remind me I have one.
 
I’m cleaning out my shop and I have a lot of stuff. What’s working for me is to take a stab at how much of one kind of thing I have (that I want to keep), put it in a nice clean cardboard box, write on it in big fat felt marker what it is and face the label out on a shelf. “BOAT PARTS” might work for you. With everyone getting Amazon deliveries, it’s not hard to get an assortment of good boxes and “put like things together” one of my wife’s great sayings.

Hope this helps. Lord knows you help enough people:nice:
 
scook said:
I***8217;m cleaning out my shop and I have a lot of stuff. What***8217;s working for me is to take a stab at how much of one kind of thing I have (that I want to keep), put it in a nice clean cardboard box, write on it in big fat felt marker what it is and face the label out on a shelf. ***8220;BOAT PARTS***8221; might work for you. With everyone getting Amazon deliveries, it***8217;s not hard to get an assortment of good boxes and ***8220;put like things together***8221; one of my wife***8217;s great sayings.

Hope this helps. Lord knows you help enough people:nice:
Click to expand...

I have several boxes of "Boat Parts" boxes already. Problem is whatever I'm looking for is never in any of them. (It's usually in a box labeled "dishes" or some such thing)........

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Great idea Scook. Been trying to consolidate smaller boxes to the tubs like Depot sells. But I have two storage sheds. One at the house and another bout 8 miles from here,so wherever I m working,what i need is cross town.

I like your idea of writing on the boxes. I put tape and wrote on mine. Came back couple weeks later and tape had curled up and fell off. I ll get a paint pen.
 
I use the cardboard boxes for stuff that I don’t use real often and try to get clear plastic boxes for more often used things, so I can see what’s in them. If you’re stuck with those black Depot boxes, white or yellow paint pens are great for labeling. I kind of prefer yellow. For me, I’ve got to see the labeling, or the stuff, at a glance.

I’m also reorganizing my roll-chests and stuff disappears as soon as the drawers close, so I’m using a tape type label maker pretty extensively on them.

Another thing I’ve learned the hard way is to not over or under sort stuff, e.g. nails, screws, bolts. If you have like things together, you can dump out a container of small machine screws, nuts & washers, paw through them for what you need and shovel the rest back into the container - same for boat parts. The key is “like enough” without overdoing it.
 
The wide black felt markers work well on standrd brown cardboard boxes. For big boxes, the really fat ones are good.
 
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