Quote Originally Posted by crappielimits View Post

As for the outboard, I would get Mercury, Suzuki or yamaha.
Just my take/experience: Working out of our aircraft maintenance shop, we pretty much work on everything other than aircraft here in the shop. Had many boats brought here to the shop for us to work on. I've owned Mercury motors and had a old 115 stack three for years on my last bass boat. Great motor but the three carbs keeping them in sync was a challenge. One weakness I've seen with Mercury is cylinders when they over heat from a bad water pump or other issues. And as we all know, water pumps will go bad. Yamahas, Johnsons and others I just haven't seen locked/frozen/damaged cylinders when they over-heat like Mercurys. Maybe its just us/me, but has anyone else seen this issue? One thing I've learned, if you got a overheat horn on a mercury (or any other motor), "MAKE" sure it is in fact working. I can't count the motors we've worked on after the water pump went bad and found the over heat horn not working.