Thread: Starting my old Evinrude

You may need a fuel pump kit too. Diaphragm probably dried out.

Yay... not seized. Actually looks pretty clean on the piston tops. Moves really easy by hand. On to step 2.

Good deal.

Them old Evinrudes and Johnsons are hard to kill, Dad had a 1969 20HP Johnson Ski-Horse on his Lund that my friends and I abused in are teens, we plowed more furrows and trenches duck hunting in shallow water and weeds then the telephone company....never replaced a impeller...didn't even give it a thought.lol

The next chore is the impeller. I would really like to be sure it pumps water just in case it starts

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Should be fine to run for a minute to see if it will pump. Mud dobbers love to plug up the tatle tail hole.

Please replace every fuel line.
I love old Evinrudes. I was raised up running an old 1957 Evinrude Fastwin, loved it.
We got many, many faithful years of service out of it. We later acquired it's little brother, the 7 1/2 HP model, looked just like it.

Originally Posted by silverside

The next chore is the impeller. I would really like to be sure it pumps water just in case it starts

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You can run it dry for a few seconds. The biggest issue with running it dry for a short amount of time isn't really that it's overheating the power head but that it is melting the impeller with no water to lube it. If it's shot and going to be replaced then it's not really an issue. You could also run it submerged even with a potentially bad impeller for a very short time but that does open up the potential for fragments of a deteriorating impeller to get lodged in the cooling passages.

If you want to check some other things out before dropping money into, I'd add also draining the lower unit oil. That will need to be done and costs nothing to drain and maybe $5 to refill. If you have really bad water intrusion that may factor into your decision to drop money into it or not.