Monday, January 30, 2012 Looking for a new (or old) outboard motor

Soooo, Wayne talked to Dennis and asked him about the 2 outboard motors that he had for sale.
He sold one already and he and his partner AJ brought the other one to the marina for us to look at.
Don’t know what happened to Dennis, but I’m guessing that it must be AJs motor since he seemed to be the one that did all talking.
It seemed like he was the one that knew everything about the motor, and he was giving us a pretty good sales pitch. The price seemed right $750 if it worked well. AJ said the guy had just tuned it up and put $200 into it. It definitely was all greased up. I got grease on my everything, handling it.
I did discover that it was one heavy mother.
When I tried to pick it up, it decided it didn’t want to be picked up…
I was able to just barely lift it and thought Holy Smokes, how am I ever going to be able to handle this beast. I liked the idea of an 8hp motor – maybe we’d be able to get somewhere without getting soaked (never could get the dinghy to plane with our little 5hp).
We had to figure out how we’d get it onto the dinghy to test it out.
AJ said, “take a look at it, see if you can start it, test it out and if you want it fine, if not, no hard feelings, just let me know”.
If you don’t want it, I’ll get it out of here right now…
We kind of stood around trying to figure out what to do and to see if we could somehow handle it (it was heavy).
AJ said – talk it over and I’ll be back.
We were going over our options and chatting with Klaus about our options. Do we go new with a new little Colman 5hp , or with a used 8hp Mercury. Light weight vs heavy…new vs old (another 2003 motor)…Mercury vs Colman (an unknown in the outboard business)… I don’t remember which one told Wayne that the Colman was an air cooled motor made by Briggs & Straton, but whichever one said it didn’t win brownie points in the knowledge base because it wasn’t either of those things. The Colman is water cooled, and built by Parsun (a Chinese Company as is many other brands now).
Anyhow, I was weighing all the pros and cons of both (We can get a Colman locally)…
We discovered that Klaus uses his main halyard to get his 9.9 on and off his boat and were trying to figure out if this was something we could do when AJ came back.
AJ decided that he’d leave it with us overnight so we could try to figure out how to get it on and off the boat tomorrow morning and give it a trial run. This was under the premise that if we scratched it (it already was scratched up) or dropped it in the water while trying to test it out, that we bought it. Seems fair… So we’ll keep trying to work out a system tonight to see if we can do the same thing as Klaus and use our main halyard to get it on and off the boat and give it a test tomorrow. All I know is we really need a motor.