Project 'Rona

[vbtravisd]

Hey fellas, my name is Travis. I am a legit gearhead, everything from motorcycles and atvs to custom jeeps and supercharged audis... if it has an engine, I like it. Son of a sailor, so I have had around 15-16 boats in my lifetime to date but I have never had a jet ski. I am always perusing FB marketplace or craigslist and I came across an ad for an old vintage seadoo. Guy said he was frustrated with it and wanted it gone. Fortunately if I have learned anything from my boats, the cheaper the boat... the bigger the problem. Unfortunately, I am a very impulsive person... and I went and picked this thing up.

So I picked up a 1989 Seadoo SP with a yellow motor. Dudeman got it for relatively cheap, is a car mechanic and figured he could bring it back to life. He replaced fuel lines, rebuilt the carb, he did put a low pressure electric fuel pump on it because he said that it "would run out of the water on the hose, but not in the water under load". It was free and came with a title, guy was really chill and pleasant to deal with, so even though he wasn't asking for anything... I handed him a cold 6 pack and drove on home.

We had some nasty weather blowing in and I needed to get yardwork done, but I poked around on this a bit. Things I noted and plan to replace:

He pulled his electric fuel pump. I plan to get a stock mechanical one, I see a few on ebay.
I see new gaskets on the motor (not sure if it was rebuilt or what)
I notice jb weld on a cylinder jug! Which to me, leads me to think a leak somewhere.
The positive battery cable was cut, so I will need to replace that.
*Should I keep the stock oil injection system or go premix?

I am going to try to get this old girl back running for as little as possible (while not being hack, but its a FREE 31 year old jet ski)... I am sure that I will have some questions, "what is this for?" "Where does this go?" type of things.

I asked my 6 year old what we should call it... she said, "let's call her Rona dad."

I will get some pics uploaded later.

Cheers guys! :beer:

 

[Ankeneyou]

Sounds like a fun project. The first thing I would check is compression. With low compression they can run out of water but wont even start under a load in the water. 150 psi is perfect and less than 120 is probably where you'll start to see issues. If compression is low, you'll need to decide if the ski is worth putting some $ into.

 

[AKnarrowback]

It's all a judgement call on your part regarding how much money you want to put into it. If the hull is solid and all the parts are there then it could be brought up to reliable running without a doubt. The parts are available with minimal searching and the machine is pretty straight forward without any fancy electronic modules or "computers".

Like was said, check the compression with a good tester. 150 is your target with no more than 10 psi difference between the two cylinders.

Next pull the pump off and drain the oil to get an idea of things inside.

Those are your two main components for making the machine move. If both are in bad shape you could be looking at $1200 +/- to get it back going reliably.

Send us some pictures of that JB weld and some overall inside and out of the machine.