Just came up with a creative way to deal with this issue and figured I’d share it. For those who are not familiar, the brass tiller shaft and gear along with the lower cower receiving side gear to control the throttle on these motors get damaged when the tiller arm is not fully folded down and the operator tries to turn the throttle. This is a design weakness.

I have found that some of these tiller arms have about a 1/8-1/4" "slop" where these gears are supposed to marry each other. If you push IN on the end of the tiller arm, it takes up this slop, but when you release, the internal spring pushes them away.

I figured out that if you take a 3/8" circlip (the type that has the 3 ‘nubs’), use a cut off tool to grind down the center ‘nub,’ and install 3 or 4 of these on the tiller side of the gear, it takes away this slop and the gears are less likely to jump out of position or break a tooth.

Push down on the end of the tiller arm when it’s folded up, and you’ll see the end of the brass gear and shaft move down/toward the lower cowel side gear. This is where you put the circlips.