Re: Would be gratefull for some WIRING HELP
They went to a standard wire color scheme after the motor was made. Your motor has a battery/ditributor ignition, so you need to connect the purple wire to the white wire, for ign power. Red goes to red, for battery +. Grey goes to the brown wire for Tach signal, black/yellow connects to orange(kills ignition, but unused on your motor). the choke wire is yellow/black(i think, better confirm), and connects to the grey wire. Black to black for ground, yellow/red is Solenoid, and connects to yellow. You do not have any overheat sensors, so those are unused.
I think that is all you should need.
I bought at an auction a 1975 85 h.p. merc 850. Problem is the harness wires were cut. I did get a new motor harness from iboats. I have also downloaded the wiring diagram for that year motor. My big problem is that a friend gave ne a nice quicksilver single lever sideshifter made in 1992. The shift cable and throttle cable seem to hook up great. The problem is there are 11 wires coming out of the main wiring cable. Most of the wires are multi colored where as the old 78 has solid colors. The colors on the ignition switch going clockwise are y/b red b/y purple black y/r. Can I run these wires to my engine? Can anyone tell me what colors go where? There is also a pig tail coming out of the box and it looks to be for the tach and trim. Or would I be better off going on e-bay for box with that years correct colors? I really don't care to spend gobs of money as I have not herd the motor run. I did give it a comp. test lowest # on the 4 cylinders was 148. Thank you for viewing. Also I do thank you and love the info I have gotten for other things. I do support iboats.