This video we work on a 75 year old Montgomery Ward Outboard motor. Its a sea king 5 hp and we will try and bring it back to life. Watch until the end to find out "will it run?" Thanks for watching!
Montgomery Ward was a catalog sales store back in the day, similar to Sears. They didn't get quite as big as Sears, and start selling things like houses. But the did sell just about anything else a person would need in their home, from clothing to appliances to tools, just like Sears did. They probably also sold the boat that would have gone with this motor. They also had some retail stores in towns, but again, not as many as Sears. They later just changed their name to Wards to try to survive. But eventually fell into bankruptcy. What remains of the company was bought out by Colony Brands in Monroe, Wisconsin (home of The Swiss Colony shops of cheese, sausage, swiss candies and pastries). And you can still find remnants of Montgomery Ward there. Back in their catalog days, Wards would sell products from many other companies. Which would sometimes be rebranded with their name. But they also designed and made many products of their own. You would have to do some research to find out if this motor was a Wards original, or if it was made buy someone else.
@@MeleeMotors No problem. One other bit of worthless trivia... Wards, Sears (and later JC Penney) used to put out catalogs that you could find in almost every house in America. They were by far the three main mail order giants around. The Sears and Penney's catalogs were printed on the same size paper, and the Sears catalog was usually about twice as many pages (thick) as Penny's. But Wards decided to have their catalogs printed on pages that were smaller than the other two. They did not make the print or images on the pages smaller, so they had fewer items in each page. But this meant that the catalog needed more pages to fit all of the items in. So it made the catalog thicker (thicker than Penney's but still not quite as thick as Sears), which gave the appearance of having more items available than they really did. Also, since the catalog was a smaller dimension, it usually got stacked on top of the other two catalogs in the homes. It was a marvelous marketing ploy for the days to try and get people to pick up the Wards catalog first to order items from. And also to cover the Sears and Penny's catalogs while they were sitting on the table, making the Wards catalog plainly visible on top of the catalog stack.
@@MeleeMotors And, according to my mother, all three catalogues spent their last days in the outhouse for use as TP. Mom said the color pages were the worst...hahaha!
Oh man! Brings back such memories! I bought a 16' steel V bottom boat with this motor. The motor was seized and I spent a week or so soaking down the cylinders and tapping the pistons with a wooden dowel until they freed up. I (like you) cleaned the carb, checked for spark got this bad boy to fire. I had a lot of fun fishing out of that boat and the little Sea King did a great job. The first run was in January and the lake was about to ice over. Me and two buddies were young (and dumb) and we launched in 28 degree weather. The motor ran great and we spent about 20 minutes on the shake down cruise. The bow was iced up at the end of the run. All of this happened in '76. About 5 years later I traded the boat and motor for a KZ-400...what a mistake. Too bad RU-vid wasn't around back then. I would have made a vid like you've done. Good job, brother! PS...get yourself a brass brazing rod the same diameter as the prop shear pin. I cut myself a bunch of pins because the first time the prop sheared I had to use a fish hook as a temporary shear pin.
I'm amazed the coils were actually in this good condition. I've seen a Johnson Seahorse from 1964 with completely junk coils in. All cracked and rusted up. Cool, you got it running. :)
also, I thought my sea king wasn't pumping water, but I took it all the way apart and the only place that water could have come out was back through the bottom but if I'm wrong I would love to know.
i have a 1968 johnson 6hp that someone gave me. put fuel to it and it fired right up. missing the twist throttle handle and spring. if someone can guide me where to get vintage parts id greatly appriciate that.
My best advice is to see if you can find a parts diagram for your model online and then try to search the parts by the oem part number. Try searching on ebay and Google and see what comes up. Ebay has been my best go to for vintage parts forsure.
