Panther

doubt it... I use to work on them....

Or you could get a merc...its loud...vibrations galore...smoke.... The race motors are still at the top but every day use I'd go with a Jap OB before a merc.

THEJOKER

I put 400 hours on a 150 HDPI and it always ran well but I've been on Mike's Fountain w/ Verados , that was impressive!

MitchStellin

I think Yamaha makes the best outboard hands down, if you wrecked one of these you must have either ran it without oil or hit a reef. I have had them all, even the Evenrude with the FICK. The new ER are made by Ski-Doo and are even better, meet 2010 emissions also. I just hate the oil mix and the smoke, I have ran out of oil a couple of times and had to search the water for an OB to bum some from, just carry a good length of clear tube and a pop bottle to put it in. This boat was rated for a 115 smoker or a 90 thumper, with the new weights they bumped the thumper to 115, kept the smoker at 115 too.

FeverMike

I see you have not been on a boat with the new Merc 225 250 300xs...no smoke hardly and the 300xs is very very quiet and vibration free.
The Verado's are so quiet that I idling out of my canal you can not even hear all 3 going...they are vibration free as well.

Sounds like you only knew the old Merc efi and carb motors...lots has changed.

Again I am not knocking the Yamaha motors it just none of them are very high performance orientated and that was the tone of the beginning of this thread. However the Merc 225 Opti has the best power to weight and fuel economy it that class and the new 300xs Opti seems to be a sweet sweet engine and the Verado's are dialed in and doing extremely well.

Panther

And how many lowers are people still blowing up?? I know a bunch of people locally who have gone thru quite a few sport masters and standard OB lowers......

Like I said, I'd get a merc for a raceboat but not for a CC that I'd be going fishing on every day. Just a personal preference....

THEJOKER

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m..._9/ai_n7071522

MitchStellin

Yup, for reliability I would stay with the 4 stroke, and as far as weight goes, a fully dressed big block is about 850lbs, then the transom assembly and drive add another 250lbs. My 115 weighs 300lbs and I can squeeze 55 mph with me alone, little fuel, trimmed out just right and a small chop, maybe a foot. The chine walk is pretty bad so you have to drive the boat and be ready to trim it down and let up on the throttle. So far everything I own except the snowmobile is a 4 stroke, this switch was made for the bikes, boat and quad. They still have a little way to go on the sleds but it will come, SkiDoo uses an SDI system that is cleaner than a 4 stroke, kind of like the Evinrude outboard but the smoke is still there and I have an 800 Carb'd sled, it has a mechanical fuel injection and jetting adjuster, kind of like throttle body so it gets 14 mpg. Sometimes if a sled is not jetted right you almost get sick riding behind them and at idle your eyes can burn. It would be nice also to not smell like oil all the time, I burn Klotz because it smells good, most synthetic oils are very good at this level so it may as well smell like race gas. Amsoil and SkiDoo oil are the worst, they stink like a 's butt. What has also been missed so far is the improved fuel mileage. These just sip fuel, my KLR 650 with a 6 gallon tank has a range of 300 + miles, it doesn't even have a fuel gage, just a 1 gallon reserve. This is a huge factor along with oil, for the sled it is $40 a gallon, I pay 30 at the snow show by the case but that is a huge expense, I can go thru almost a gallon on a big weekend. So the future is the 4 stroke, there will be a day when anything that burns oil will go like the dinosaurs....except for a Diesel truck.

MitchStellin

I read this after my last post...Typical Mercury, they want their cake and eat it too. I bet the idiots never even thought that their bitc hing was going to bite them so hard they would bleed. Just a case of a big company not talking to itself, I bet this lawsuit went forward without the bean counters knowing about it, just some tool exec who saw a promotion because he/she had an agenda....and you know Yamaha did not point it out, they saw a way to increase the cost and profit. That's why they are so profitable, they keep playing on our big, stodgy, arrogant and ignorant Corporate world, be it boats, motors or automobiles. We just have too much fat and nothing gets done until it is too late.

FeverMike

That article is 4 years old. What ever happened with the suit?

Panther

"2 Feb 2005 Yamaha won the outboard dumping case brought by Mercury. Brunswick and Yamaha then settled the pricing and availability case brought forward after the dumping case was filed."

http://www.rbbi.com/

http://hotdocs.usitc.gov/docs/pubs/701_731/pub3752.pdf