My mechanic swears by Volvo so I bought an 11 and 12 foot Volvo cable. The transmission cable is a foot longer, because of the loop over the engine. At the beginning, I manually ground some of the lever box since the lever was limited in how far it could go because of the lip on the box. Second, I loosened the bracket holding the throttle cable against the interior aft position of the pedestal too much and it fell down to the bottom. However, I bought a 4' wood wand from Home Depot ($.88), went one night with a flash light and poked it through the steering cable outlet and it came right out, after about 5 minutes. I had one guy in the marina try to convince me to take the whole pedestal off to get at the piece and my mechanic tried to convince me to buy a specialized grabber to get it. This sort of thing was like an intelligence test. Who is the biggest idiot in the marina. Me for causing the problem or some people who come up with these ridiculous solutions?
Now, how do you get the bracket back on there? Well, it's rounded perfectly to fit my nice wooden magic wand and I used one long piece of electrical tape to secure it in place, and then candy caned the tape up the rest of the wand. Carefully, placed the bracket behind the screw and in it went. Pull the tape off as one long piece and use another wand to poke it a bit, and out it came. A surprisingly annoying thing was to get the throttle cable back into the bracket because of the angle it comes into the pedestal from below. That took about an hour or so to get right. Everything is back on and in it's place, except I now have to buy a throttle cable clamp because the throttle on the engine is designed to fall back (or at least that is what my mechanic tells me). So now I have to find a clamp to put on the cable so that it sticks in position. As is most things on the boat, this took about 5 times longer than I had originally expected and turned into being way more complicated for what should be a simple thing. Yes, I know everyone makes it sound like it was lickety split, but, at least for me, it wasn't. But a good education though.
