1971 9.5HP Evinrude Johnson Outboard

1971 9.5hp Evinrude on Boston Whaler Port
1971 9.5hp Evinrude on Boston Whaler Port

One of the things I acquired when I bought the 1966 Boston Whaler 13′ was a small outboard engine. In my usual manor, I tried ti finagle the price down on the whaler a bit. The owner didn’t want to budge so he threw in a bonus. He secretively drove me across the street and opened a door to his shed. There in all it’s glory, was a 1971 9.5hp Evinrude outboard, looking like it was in pretty good condition.

Interestingly enough, this looked like the same engine that was on the skiffs I used to rent to fish for Fluke/Flounder in Long Island in my late teens. Needless to say I bought the whaler, the 55hp Johnson and this little guy.

Giving the Evinrude 9.5HP a Checkout

I quickly notified my son who came over to see the new toys. I gave him the Evinrude and of course, we had to test it out. The previous owner couldn’t remember the last time it was started, he thought it was probably over 20 years ago when his dad had it. That didn’t sound too promising but that didnt stop us.

Inspecting the Engine

The first thing we did was remove the cowling. Surprisingly enough, the engine looked pretty clean considering the age. Next we tried manually turning over the engine. It turned over easily and had enough resistance to suggest that it had decent compression as well. so we decided to start it and see what happened.

I wanted to make sure it had water to run through the pump so we placed it in a 5 gallon bucket. After filling the bucket up we hooked up a gas tank to it. The tank had a 50:1 ration of oil to gas. This is the standard mix for all Evinrude and Johnson outboard motors.

1971 9.5hp Evinrude engine Power Head
Surprisingly clean engine on the 9.5HP Evinrude

Starting the Evinrude 9.5

1971 9.5hp Evinrude on Back of Boston Whaler
1971 9.5hp Evinrude on Back of Boston Whaler

We gave the starter rope a few pulls. Amazingly enough, it started after a few pulls! I ran it through the various speed ranges, from idle to wide open and that little engine purred like a kitten! The water pump seemed to be fine. It didn’t take it long to stream a jet of water from the port on the back. Where we ran into a bit of trouble was trying to shift it. The unit would not shift out of neutral. After several attempts at shifting we came to the conclusion that we had a bit of work to do on it.

Fogging the Outboard

Before shutting it down, I wanted to give it a good fogging. I sprayed Sea foam through the carbs at various positions of the throttle. Once I was satisfied that it had a good amount of Sea Foam in the system we shut it down. I did a bit of research on this problem.  we were going to have to drop the lower unit to get to the root of the problem.

My plan is to drop the lower unit. This shouldn’t be too difficult on a 9.5hp Evinrude.  Once we do that we’ll take apart the gear case. Hopefully we’ll be able to sort the shifter problem there. Additionally, since the lower unit will be off, I’ll change the impeller on it as well. My thinking being that the rubber impeller was most likely in pretty bad condition considering its age.