Update on the gas outboard.. We recently did an outing involving a fair amount of motoring - and this particular outing is part of the reason I put the outboard on. You start in Lake Havasu on a day with N or NW winds forecast and motor up the Colorado river into Topock Gorge. River currents are fairly mild, maybe 2 to 3 mph normally. We motored about 15 miles with about 10 of that into both wind and current. We then did a really fine downwind sail back through the Gorge - wind and current in the same direction. The 15 mile down wind sail was with the motor in the up position in some fairly strong wind / waves at times. This is when you are glad to have a robust mount. The first set of pictures are of this trip - you can see the outboard in a couple of the pictures
viewtopic.php?f=70&t=57128Anyhow, 15 miles with a lot of that into the wind and current required filling that one quart tank on the outboard multiple times and after using those 20 oz red tanks.. think they somewhat SUCK for this application. You still need a funnel to not spill any gas.
What I think is the best way to fill the tanks now is with a one gallon plastic tank with the "spill proof" nozzle like this
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Scepter-Amer ... /204342757 The one gallon plus the tank in the outboard still have a huge range of over 40 miles and all you have to do is fill the tank every hour.
With this "spill proof" nozzle, you stick the end of the nozzle into the tank and press down, gas comes out. When the gas gets up to some level, it stops flowing - ie, spill proof. You slowly lift the nozzle out of the outboard tank to let the last drips out.
However.. the one I have still fills the tank too high so I modified it a little so that the gas doesn't get as close to the top. Mod is just a little cutout of the black plunger hanger.
I put water in the gas tank to test, with the modified plunger the picture below shows how high the gas gets to before the auto shutoff.
Below - on the right before mod, on the left after mod so that the gas level is lower when the shut off occurs.
The other thing about long motoring (in this case nearly 3 hours), the wake from the outboard shaft is constantly washing up onto the rear round hatch and mine is not completely water tight so I get a constant leak into the hull. I probably had several gallons of water in the main hull when we turned around. So I added a Lexan water deflector like others (CR Yacker - see a page or two back) have done in this thread. I think I will still end up with some water in the hull but this hopefully will cut it down.