Mercury/Tohatsu 6HP Outboard: Review, Walk-Through, & Test Run. Best Jon Boat Motor?

[Music] [Applause] what is up everybody i have never had more of a love-hate relationship with something than i do with this motor i just got it this season got it basically new it had 10 hours on it so today what i wanted to do is just do a quick walkthrough of this mercury outboard give you a quick review give you my opinion and then we're going to hit the water and do a quick little test run let's check it out so this motor is a 2018 six horsepower mercury four stroke this guy is 57 pounds dry so very portable it is a single cylinder the downside with single cylinder it's gonna be a little bit more noisy if you step up to the eight horsepower that is a two cylinder and you get a little bit better balancing with the two cylinder than you do with the single cylinder just like with almost every other outboard this is water cooled you've got your water impeller standard spot right here drop your lower end unit you'll see the impeller right there comes with the three blade prop here drain fill lower end unit all under the tiller handle there is the oil drain plug once again this is four strokes so you've got to have oil it does not take a mix here is ford neutral reverse kill switch your hookup for external tank tiller handle basically have three positions start restart and then throttle here is gas control valve on off standard thrust rod usually with this motor i've got a 12 foot boat i am trim position number four from the bottom let's take the cowl off we'll check it out beautiful looking inside there's your spark plug single cylinder here is oil fill obviously gas gas line coming from your cut off also note on this you want this closed if you use an external tank carb fuel filter fuel pump this is your safety linkage so if you have it in forward or reverse it prevents the pull start from engaging four five and six horsepower motors are the exact same motor except the six horsepower has a slightly larger carburetor so they're pushing out a few extra horsepower with the same exact engine if you have a four and you want to step it up there are kits that cost a little under 200 bucks to get two extra horsepower i've been stuck out on the water because i forgot something one thing something stupid i either didn't open the gas tank vent or i didn't open the gas valve or my kill switch lanyard wasn't engaged on the kill switch yeah stupid i know one two three right one two three if it won't start if you're cold starting tiller handle and start position here is choke control here all the way out full choke give it a few pulls once you hear it going and it's idling well close that choke all the way with this specific engine i've never had to do half choke it's always full choke immediately kill it so i've had this for about five months so far and like i said i have a love hate relationship with this thing so i just want to give a my opinion on reliability value and power reliability wise i have never been out on the water and felt like i was going to be stranded never i feel extremely confident on this the one issue that i have is cold starting for this specific motor this specific one that i have which was a used one i have a very hard time cold starting this i even take the data on how many pulls it takes me to start it and so far this year it's averaged right at five poles to start it when it's cold i know it's ridiculous actually taking data on starting how many pulls it takes to start but i was really curious because i was getting so frustrated with it but once it's warm it's first pull every time no issue so my opinion i think the guy before me ran ethanol fuel so ethanol fuel just mess up your carburetor there's a small idle port that's really responsible for starting and providing the correct fuel air ratio for cold starting that thing probably has some contamination in it i need to take that carb off and clean it and i think i will get better performance from cold starting but i will say if you look up the reviews for this guy the majority of bad reviews is starting issues and i truly believe that it all has to do with this carb right here they have to meet so many strict epa regulations that the ports are so small and everything is so tight any contamination will really mess up the starting performance of this so it's really important with this motor and i would say with any small horsepower motor like this that have to meet epa regulations that you run non-ethanol gas and if you have to run ethanol gas put an ethanol gas treatment in it and regardless of what fuel you use use a fuel stabilizer now value this will cost you about eighteen hundred dollars new plus tax fees you're gonna leave out the door two grand i bought this used for a thousand so two to three year old motor six horsepower mercury's you can get for between a thousand twelve hundred dollars but the tahatsu's are the same exact motor and new and get a tahatsu for around 1500 to 1600 dead set on getting a brand new one honestly i would go to hotsou and save 300 bucks power if you look at the reviews the number two complaint is power i had a four horsepower yamaha two-stroke on this boat before this motor and i will say they are very similar in power output but when you step up to the eight that's where you're really going to see the big difference because you've got those two cylinders versus the one cylinder speed wise check out the speed video i did i can clip 18 with this six horsepower on this 12 foot common crawdad i can clip 18 but cruising speed 16 all day long overall power i am okay value used i am okay tahatsu i'm okay i think mercury is a little bit high reliability i am okay if i can solve the cold starting issue i think this motor is going to be a workhorse for me i think it's going to last me a long time overall i'm very pleased with this setup six horsepower on a 12 foot flat bottom that's my quick rant slash review and my opinion of how this has performed so far this year so let's hit the water and see how she runs let's do it i left my life jacket in the truck okay all right we're on the water starting procedure gas vent fuel valve open choke federal control on start and we pull and we pull and we pull and we pull until it starts one two three four five six ah what was that seven and now the rest of the day it will take one pull let's go take it for a ride here's our runway we're about quarter throttle this is about eight miles an hour all right we're fully planed right now it's about 14 miles an hour right here i'm gonna give it full throttle and we're gonna get up to get up to about 16. all right there's full throttle and we're smoking we just clipped 17. so from a power perspective the only thing that i really don't like is that 20 seconds it takes to really clean this guy out it feels like the motor is bogging down until it fully planes then it goes maybe if i go to a four blade prop that might help comment below how can i get on plane faster but let's do that again i'll show you the back view one more time but we were we were fine a half half throttle right there we're not playing we're not playing that's full throttle we're still not playing we're still not playing it'll break loose here in a second there it goes now we're playing and she is smoking now i don't want to go much faster than this in this plastic boat man i love this motor it's just two things two things cold starting and that initial power the time it takes to get planed out man hope he's okay [Music] oh [Music] i would not think twice about killing this motor in the middle of this current well i have 100 confidence that it's going to start all right we're right above all this junk that's right when i kill this motor that current's going to suck us right in there here we go bam so reliability wise i'm very very pleased once that motor's warm i did another video on fuel efficiency with this thing it's got a 0.3 gallon gas tank internal gas tank with the full tank of gas this will go slightly over 9 miles and miles to the gallon performance is over 30 miles per gallon so if you've got a gallon gas tank backup gas tank in the boat which i do i know that will give me roughly around 30 miles which is crazy i mean i'm not going to run 30 miles in this boat in a day so that's well that's good enough for anything that i'm going to do you don't need a 50 000 boat to have fun this costs a thousand dollars used this boat i got for free but you can get a boat like this for three hundred dollars i've got a utility trailer i don't even have a boat trailer and it works perfect i have such a good time going out on small rivers and small streams i'm about 20 miles into this trip and i haven't had one single issue yet so so far what was that oh my gosh man i love it i'm just one of those things that i love but there's just a couple of little little things that just just bug me i don't know i have fun in this little boat with this little motor i don't really have to worry about it i hit a log i hit a log as long as i don't flip me over if you have any questions put them down below as always please if you harvest fish out of small streams please use common sense and please pick up your trash have a good one all the lights are reflections

Channel: Skinny River

Views: 39,263

Rating: 4.8354754 out of 5

Keywords: mercury, 6hp mercury, 6hp tohatsu, four-stroke, four stroke, coleman crawdad, jon boat, outboard review, mercury review, tohatsu outboard, tohatsu vs mercury, jon boat motor, outboard, small outboard, nissan outboard, marine motor, small boat motor, small boat engine, jon boat engine, jon boat speed test, outboard speed test, mercury test run, tohatsu test run, outboard test run, 6hp test run, 4 stroke, fast jon boat, john boat, mercury outboard, outboard motor

Id: Kew6QbQ0_30

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020