Re: Does a short shaft, remote, 50+ HP outboard motor exist?
Maingirl, to answer your question, yes short shaft 50+ horsepower motors do exist. The later ones tended to be of interest to racers or people with light, fast, shallow draft hulls.
Judging by the photos of your neat old aluminum boat, I see what appears to be a 1968 Johnson 65 horse short shaft. It could also be an 85 horse. They were the last of the V4s offered with short shafts, except possibly some racing motors. Those V4s are also the last of the old style ?super quiet? lower units that pre-dated the through-hub exhaust. They might even have the mechanical shift (the old 60/65s only came that way while the 75/80/85s came with mechanical shift or Electramatic shift). Those were the last editions of the early V4s and as such I remember the parts being somewhat expensive back in the days when parts were readily available. At least if it is in fact a 1968 model it will use surface gap plugs and CDI ignition, not the belt driven distributor-magneto type ignition that its predecessors came with. If the motor is an Electramatic 85 I would hesitate to jump in with both feet due to nearly non-existent and/or very pricey parts availability. It?s not that they were bad motors, they were very good, but 45 years after they were made it is a different story.
Any objections to running a pair of 40s, or even a pair of looper 50s?
The 50, 70 & 75 loopers from the 1970s were available in short shaft but they were always relatively scarce. They were of interest to boaters with small, light, fast boats with shallow draft. The only 50 I would consider is a 1973+ with the Powershift II transmission. Same goes for the 70 & 75-horse 3 cylinder looper motors. The 70 & 75-horse triples with short shaft, unlike the long shaft version, did not used the self-contained tilt tube for steering where you can simply run the cable to the motor, then attach a little ?bow-like? adapter from the transom clap to the steering tab on the motor. The shorties used the older style tilt tube where one end had to anchored to the transom, just like the pre-1973 motors.
Anyway, I am just rambling. That Mercury 80 short shaft looks like a good motor. Probably about a 1978+. Older Mercs scare me because of parts availability, and proprietary tools to work on them.
