[THEFERMANATOR]

He's talking about 2 different boats here. He had a 73 I/O and now he has an 86 outboard with a cut down transom. In 86 the transom could have been cut down by the factory as well though as 20" and 25" were both options at that time. As for your XRI, that is one POWERFUL SOB when it's running, but it sounds like somebody done tweaked the goody out of her. The XRI's were cheater engines that pushed the 10% rule for ALL it was worth. I know my 150 XRI I had on my flat's boat was one MEAN sucker. The 200 XRI's were said to run with any of the bigger 225 MERCURY feeshin motors. As for an engine, there are plenty of good used 200HP 2.5L powerheads around. I would head over to screamandfly .com as them guys are all MERC fans and you can possibly find a good freshawater only powerhead over there. Your also close to LAKE O, there are alot of good used engines over there as well(That's where I picked my cherry 150 up at).