The shift shaft came up with the seal holder on my 1998 BF 90 lower unit and will not re-engage. Heard a "click" when shaft came up. Any hint on how I might bet this back in or am I "shafted"? Thanks in advance.

Probably have to disassemble gearcase to reinstall shift cam on shift shaft.

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Boats.net
Honda Outboard Parts

Hope you got this taken care of okay. Just did the same on my port motor on my Seacat with twin 1997 BF90's. Replaced the shift seal last year on my starboard motor no problem without knowing I had to take care about keeping the shift shaft held down, but no such luck with this one. It's frustrating the amount of work it takes to correct a little mistake. I've seen some people say you can pry the cam back into place working through the shfit shaft hole with a light and a lot of patience, but after I gave up, my mechanic tried that for two days with no luck. If you can get your bearing carrier off, it's not that hard to do realign yourself. But my SELOC manual's description of "any commercially available gear puller" is far from true for pulling the carrier. You need a fairly specific two jaw bar puller. My bearing carrier casing was corrosion welded to the lower unit, and after three days my mechanic ended up destroying part of the carrier and my reverse thrust bearing pulling it out. Being as I'm in a remote part of Mexico with no Honda parts available, not so great. (And I know it's a Mercury lower unit on these models, but there ain't no Merc parts here either.) Putting an order in to boats.net for a bunch of little goodies to get me going again.

The SELOC manual is completely useless in regards to anything to do with shifting and seal replacement. If I had an OEM Honda service manual at the time, I would have known better than to let the shift shaft come up, but I only have that manual now. I also would have never known how to fix my nearly impossible shifting, a problem which I discovered resides in the upper shift shafts between the linkage and the lower unit, not in my cables or lower unit. Instead of a single rod running down to connect to the lower unit shift shaft, it's a very short 2" rod with a gear on it that meshes with the gear of a long rod that runs to the bottom of the driveshaft housing, where the lower unit shift shaft mates with it. When those gears get out of alignment, that can cause all kind of shifting difficulties. I've found zero on the internet about it, and without the OEM manual, I never would have known it was two separate shafts and what you have to do to realign it. (Just like the lower unit, if you're replacing the water seal in the seal holder up top, you have to be careful not to raise the upper shift shaft up or the gears will fall out of meshing alignment.)