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Old 10-26-2011, 07:02 PM   #27
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
RE: How do you start you boat?

All extended cranking to build oil pressure accomplishes is to put more wear on the starter.

The telling argument to me that supports simply starting an engine in the manner prescribed by the manufacturer is that engines don't die because people didn't crank them to build oil pressure, or use the manufacturer's starting instructions including partial throttle at startup. Nor are their lives extended by cranking to build oil pressure before starting, or by using the cold start to push more fuel into the engine so it can be started at idle instead of the called-for partial throttle setting.

From what I have read and been told by people in the engine manufacturing industry, an engine will die of some other cause long before the "excess" wear at startup caused by a momentary lack of lubrication will have any effect at all.

Not sure with this notion of "high speed" start with partial throttle setting comes from. Maybe some engines will do this, but it doesn't happen with our FL120s, at least not the way we start them. As I said, with the power lever set per the manufacturer's start instructions, the engines fire almost immediately. And the instant they do, I retard the power levers. I watch the tachs when I do this and they never exceed 1,000 rpm. In fact I have to add throttle back in to get to their warm-up rpm of 1,000 rpm.

And even if the engine did "vroom" up to a higher rpm at startup, ever listen to a car start? I've got a 24-year-old BMW with almost 250,000 miles on the clock that I drive every weekday to work. The head has never needed to come off, compression is right where it should be, and so on. Every morning when I start it, it "vrooms" into life and then the rpm settles back to about 1200 or so until it starts warming up. This engine isn't going to last forever, obviously, but when it does need an overhaul or replacement, it won't be because of the way it starts.
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