jprice26

To me it sounds like something going on with the cables, let us know what else you find when you get in there.

I pulled the whole mechanism out, and everything looked ok. Cables are fine, they move super easy.
I backed out the friction screws as much as possible. The starboard throttle seems ok now(still a little tight, but ok), but the port one is still brutally tight. Seems that something is out of whack in the shifter that's causing that pivot point to bind up when it's in forward.
So I decided to take the whole thing apart to see what was going on in there. Of course the screws are completely seized up (or maybe they used red loctite?). Tried the heat gun to loosen them up, and I thought I finally had one coming out, but all I ended up doing was shearing the screw head off. Tried another one, same thing. wtf? Did they epoxy these damn screws in place?
I might try a screw extractor, but considering how tight they are, I'm not even sure that will work. Maybe I'm just stuck with a painfully tight throttle.

Update:
Ok, so it doesn't have anything to do with the engine running. I've always had it in neutral when off, so I made the correlation to the engine running, but I just went out to the garage and put it in drive/forward, and then tried the throttles. Sure enough, they were tight as all hell. go figure

Still don't have any idea what this means. Going to go pull them out and see what it looks like under there. Maybe something is getting jammed up.