Thanks once again! I'm going to continue to pick your brain for knowledge, as long as you'll let me. Big debate on the fuel mix with my work/buddies. I am curious if two stroke oil was even "a thing" in the 1950's? Did a 16/1 ratio consist of 30 weight oil and the leaded gasoline mix? I don't want to kill Her before She gets back in the water. Hypothetical question here. If it was Your 64 year old still firing up outboard. What specifically would you mix to make it run and possibly keep running for quite some time?
There is no shortage of opinions out there when it comes to gas and oil. Believe whatever you want, I guess. Since you asked, I have about 15 motors, ranging from 1909 to 1984. I run all of them at 24:1 except the 1984 which gets 50:1 that it was designed for. And the 1909 which is being restored and not running yet.
There is a thread of truth in all the opinions. Oil and gas is not what it was in 1950. It is far better. That old leaded gas and car oil carboned up the outboards big time. If you look at an old service manual, you will see that pulling the cylinder head and scraping the carbon out was part of a normal tune-up.
One other thing, those motors were not very clean. They did dump a lot of unburned fuel into the lake. Not very popular around some people these days. I run mine. Follow your conscience on yours. BTW, I use 100% synthetic TC-W3 outboard oil, which is bio-degradable and smokes less.