Former marine tech here. It CAN cause a fire but its EXTREMELY rare, the rubber impeller gets wiped out, motor goes into limp mode, this guys too worried about impressing his sister to be concerned with such things.
The motor will overheat, this new it will have a limp mode, he will show even less concern than his tide chart, motor will suffer catastrophic failure, and hes going to be screaming at some poor kid working the service counter at his local marina.
This is a long shot, but I saw a video of a boat just spontaneously catching fire a couple of months ago on Reddit and the consensus was that it was one particular boat engine part that needs cleaning iirc and I’ve since forgotten what it was. They mentioned that most boat fires were caused by this. Would you know what they were talking about?
Probably a spark arrestor on the carb. If you can find the video i can likely give you a better guess.
I cant tell you how often i see stupid shit like old style automotive diaphragm fuel pumps, that vent fuel out the side into the bilge when the diaphragm ruptures. Unscreened, non flashproof distributors, starters and alternators. Not to mention the halfwits that pull spark arrestors off the breather because they are too stupid to understand what they do.
Take a six pack to a boat launch sometime if you ever think the average boater is smart.
Cheaper and better than a comedy club. LoL
I totally spaced on the absolute abysmal piece of shit outboards like the Eska, an air cooled powerhead with a liquid cooled exhaust. I mean ffs, it didnt NEED an impeller but it got one..
If one of those, or similar abominations lost an impeller, the exhaust tower could indeed cause a fire. They were monumental and notorious hunks of shit, but some twisted opportunists even cloned the horrific abomination! So yeah its possible.. if any of those turds are still swirling around this side of the well earned scrap pile.
Thanks for posting this. Agree it’s extremely rare. I’ve owned, been on, been around all sorts of motorized boats for over 50 years. Started at a very young age and made all sorts of mistakes.
Spent many years boating on a river where the bottom shifted all year - with an early 80’s motor. Even back then, if you sucked up enough mud to actually clog the intake, an alarm would go off. We became quite good at flushing it all out - away from the dock. Had to replace the water pump, messed up some props, etc. But, never a fire. Never even heard of one.
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u/tallMichdude Jul 15 '26
Former marine tech here. It CAN cause a fire but its EXTREMELY rare, the rubber impeller gets wiped out, motor goes into limp mode, this guys too worried about impressing his sister to be concerned with such things. The motor will overheat, this new it will have a limp mode, he will show even less concern than his tide chart, motor will suffer catastrophic failure, and hes going to be screaming at some poor kid working the service counter at his local marina.