I agree chris, ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ in any application. Like I mentioned before I’ve seen 4-5 of these motors with kits still installed for sale on the open market in the last year (mostly by folks asking unrealistic amounts with the ‘ol "last time it was used it ran…10 years ago), and it’s a matter of time before I finally get one for my personal collection. The 10hp motors are pretty simple to adapt for remote controls and much more convenient to work on with fewer things to go wrong…but not as compact for sure.

On the topic of 9.5’s, in my first batch of 5 of these motors I worked on in December, I noticed there is in fact a difference in the manual starters between the 10-year run of these ‘Staten island toilet bowls’.

Some of the starters have a shorter internal housing (where the spring ties into), some are taller, and if you have the wrong one for the particular motor they simply don’t interchange. Changes to the intake manifold and reed plate/structure can be interesting, and of course the vibration dampeners go through a revolution, but the rest of the motor seems pretty much consistent over that decade.

It’s always fun when you have a stuck driveshaft in the crank, and do a full teardown. When you can’t use a sledge to remove the driveshaft and have to resort to swapping cranks, getting the taper pins out can turn into more of a process depending on which revision of the motor you’re dealing with, and how many gasket you’ll have to replace by removing the intake manifold just to get a punch lined up with the lower and upper SB taper pins.

And the engineering & application flaw of this motor, which I hold as my personal opinion, is the inner exhaust gasket. There is a gap between the screws where the exhaust bypass water jacket flows and exhaust pulses flow, where I have seen 2 out of 40 motors have failures on in the last year. I just stocked up on 35 NOS inner exhaust gaskets for this specific problem. I’m sure these will be needed over the next couple of decades if this trend continues in a proportionate amount!

PS I HATE STUCK FLATHEAD SCREWS WITH A PASSION.

Really cheap. 😯

The kit for the 9.9-15 is a lot more expensive.