View Single Post
Old 11-01-2012, 01:46 AM   #64
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Quote:
Originally Posted by rwidman View Post

Unfortunately, the USA's EPA doesn't care much about our silly little problems and has pretty much made them unavailable in the USA.
Other than the bigger environmentally approved 2-strokes from Evinrude and the like the two stroke is pretty much dead in the US as Ron says. However there is a diminishing glimmer of hope for someone who really wants a 2-stroke.

A couple of years ago when we decided to replace the 1978 Evinrude 6hp trolling motor on our Arima with something newer and more reliable I talked to the local Yamaha dealer about what would work on our boat. The four-stroke-only policy at Yamaha had already gone into effect. But he said that a lot of dealers, including them, knowing the 2-stroke cut-off date was approaching, had ordered inventories of the more popular 2-stroke engines to have in stock in the event a customer still wanted one.

The best Yamaha choices for our boat and its kicker mount were the new 6hp 4-stroke and the no-longer-available 8hp 2-stroke. The 8hp seemed the ideal engine and it turned out the dealer had ten of them. But...... the Arima requires a long-shaft trolling motor and none of the ten the dealer had were long shafts. Nor was he able to find a long-shaft in the northwest states. So we went with the 6hp 4-stroke which so far has been an excellent engine.

But if you really want a 2-stroke it's worth checking with the dealers, particularly the large ones who could afford to stock up, because they may still have some in inventory.
Marin is offline   Reply With Quote