Re: 80hp mercury lower end
Ok I'll take a shot at this because no one else is. <br /><br />You want the lower unit in forward gear. You can play around with it to see what this is, but it should be had by turning the shift shaft clockwise from neutral one click (looking at lower unit from above). If I remember right, it can continue to rotate past that point, clockwise, but you want it just clicked into forward, just one click clockwise of neutral. <br /> <br /><br />OK, now we find a couple things. On the motor end of the shift cable there's a pin, or you could call it a solid metal cylinder, that's about 0.3 or 0.35 inches in diameter. This is the pin that gets trapped into the shift linkage when on the motor. <br /><br />The other thing to find is the exhaust plate, a big mostly flat metal plate taking up most of the rear port side of your motor. <br /><br />OK, now set the shift linkage so that the pin, or at least the hole in the linkage that the pin would go in, is even with the front edge of the exhaust plate. More precisely, the rear edge of the hole in the linkage for the pin should line up with the front edge of the exhaust plate. <br /><br />Now put the lower unit on. Note that exact positioning isn't too critical - the shift shaft splines are pretty coarse, so as long as your close, when you wiggle the shift linkage a bit to get things to engage (when you're pushing the lower unit up), things will fall into place.<br /><br />Now, I've done this a number of times for 50hp Mercs, and my manual says the 80s are the same. Could be totally wrong...
