I was able to fix it myself in about 5 minutes yesterday. As soon as I looked at the shift cable at the throttle I new it was wrong. The adjustment was all the way out and the nut to keep it in place was not even secured. Something tells me someone at the factory skip this item on their check list.

I removed the cotter pin. Turn the adjustment to be 1/2 inch closer on the thread. Place it back and and secured the nut. Made sure the gear forward and rear engaged before the throttle cable did. Easy to see when your under there. Boated all day and it shifting was perfect. Thanks everyone!

Great to hear it was an easy fix!

Great! But you still need to get a shop manual since you are so far from a dealer. You will use it lots of times a year and one trip saved from the dealer will be worth the cost.

For sure I'll get one. I love knowing how the engine and drive works. Saves time and money.

Glad to have come across this thread. I seem to have developed a delay in forward engaging. Takes up to 2 seconds (that's a long time when you're manuevering in tight quarters with windy conditions) but its still smooth as silk when it does. Reverse jumps in almost too soon and abit rougher. I'm going to have to look in to what you adjusted.

Echo 'get a manual', if not factory, ANY kind...

The clue I read was "Reverse has no problem engaging. But gets very stiff after I push it a little."--your cable was already tight in reverse but your stick wasn't done 'pushing' it. Sounds like yours was so far out you're lucky it came OUT of reverse without having to shift past neutral. Glad you could see and fix it yourself, now you know your boat a little better. Warrantee's are nice, but sometimes it's like going to the ER for a hangnail, just easier to do it yourself.

I had the same thing happen to my SX drive that developed around 50 hours of use. It would gain rpm before engaging into forward. I fixed mine by adjusting the linkage on the drive. Also, I've found that applying marine grease to the linkage every season reduces the effort to shift into forward and back to reverse. Every now and then it requires a quite a bit of effort to go into neutral from forward. Grease seems to help a bunch.

Where exactly do you apply the grease? To the linkage on the drive? Mine takes quite a bit of effort to shift into gear..

After owning my last boat with a Volvo DP for a few years, it would occasionally take a second or two to go into gear, especially from neutral to forward. This would never happen when the engine was cold, but only after it ran for awhile.

Not too cool if you are trying to dock it.

It only happened a few times, and I ended up getting rid of it when I got my current boat before I figured out what was going on. It felt like the delay was related to the cable, as it felt kind of "muddy" - which is about the best I can describe it.


Typically the cable system tends to snake around the boat - you should see my current boat - the cables are probably 30ft long, and each goes through at least 540 degrees of direction change.

Things I can think of are; stiff cable due to too many bends, stiff cable due to a dirty cable, or possibly a faulty installation with too tight of a bend that could create a trouble-spot as the boat ages.

While this is not from Volvo, I looked at the documentation for my Teleflex shifters. There is no mention of lubrication as a maintenance issue, so I am not sure if this would be possible.

The only thing I could find is the mention of a bend radius in the cables of not less than 8". Since production boats are sometimes designed and constructed haphazardly, I'll bet there are some installations that exceed this.

I would check the throttle disk plate adjustment screw first. It takes two minutes. Here is the link to the thread that I used to adjust mine.

You first take the center cover off.


This is with the rest of the cover off and throttle removed. You don't need to do this. It's just to show where the adjustment screw is. Instead you just move the throttle lever back to have access to the hole where the screw is.