[CLucas]

Running into an issue with the late model Atomic 4 in our Pearson 30 and looking for some suggestions....

The engine starts reliably and without hesitation and runs smoothly. After what I believe is a satisfactory warm-up period, the engine will sometimes stall when shifting into gear. It will stutter very briefly before stalling and I can sometimes ‘catch’ it before it stalls by playing the throttle a bit. Once she’s in gear, she runs fine though I recently had a stall coming into the work dock at our club when backing down to neutral and shifting into reverse.

What I’ve checked thus far… I checked my plugs (new this season) for fouling and found only light soot. Since I use the engine pretty infrequently and it tends to run cool, I switched over Autolite 437s since they run a little hotter. I adjusted the fuel mixture screw a quarter turn clockwise (i.e. a little richer) – not much difference, but an additional quarter turn caused it to run a little rough so I backed it to its original position. I adjusted the idle a bit higher this morning, but am not convinced this is the underlying cause. Sitting on the mooring and backing down/moving forward on the pennant didn’t result in a stall, but I’m looking for some additional insight on this.

Could this be as simple as an idle adjustment? Thanks in advance for any thoughts or comments. (BTW, I'm cross posting this over at Moyer Marine's forums as well.)

-Chris