No kidding!

op, take a pic of your engine and post it here. It's really obvious if it's a looper or a cross flow.

well I just checked it and its definitely a solid block between the heads so a Looper it is ! and I see that on top of the flywheel its marked at 18 degrees in red.

just came back from taking out my Looper, she
ran really well. only thing was my tac red 4800 a WOT. Should I be thinking re prop?

Get a known good tach and make sure yours is correct first. From your previous posts it sounds like your timing got set to 18 instead of 22 which would derate you to 120HP and cause your RPM's to be lower. I would stick with the 18 degrees of timing as it is ALOT safer on your engine, and reprop it to turn up to 5500-5600 or so at WOT.

Ferm, I will do just that. Thanks a lot.

Ferm, I swapped out the tack and I;m still only turning 4800 rpm's. I currently have a 15x17 aluminum prop, I'm confused on weather to change the size /pitch and or both. any suggestions ? thanks,

It sounds like you need to drop down to a 15 pitch prop for it. Also it may be worth checking to make sure it has the 2.25:1 lower unit gears. Alot of the V4 large gear cases fail, and get swapped out for V6 gear cases(same size), but the V6 case has 1.86:1 gears and the V4 version of it has 2.25:1 gears. Put the engine in gear, mark the prop and flywheel, and see how many rotations of the flywheel it takes for 1 revolution of the prop.

I took the boat out again yesterday and had the same old problem, she would run great for the first couple of minutes then start to miss and bog rite down to where I cant get the rpm;s above 2000. Yhen while going along at 2000 rpm,s and the throttle in the wide open position she would just take off like a bat out of hell. It clearly seems like the longer I run it the worse the problem gets. Now it sounds like fuel but I took that tank out and flushed it my self 3x's just to be sure I was eliminating any bad fuel issues. And I took this boat out last week with no issues what so ever !! It ran really well, She has a new fuel pump ( VRO removed), New Timer base new Power packs; Carbs rebuilt, Wires. plugs. Seriously stumped here!!!

what's the status of the primer bulb when this happens?