A couple of winters back, my then 14-year-old son Fritz started a full scale restoration of the 1992 14-foot McKee Craft Angler that we split the cost on. I documented his remarkable, bloody knuckles rebuild in the pages of Power & Motoryacht, and by late the following spring, a beautiful, seafoam green McKee was blasting away from our boat landing.
The boat’s 1996 Evinrude 48 SPL powerplant was a noisy, smoky little beast that would zoom the boat to 31 knots on a calm day. During the restoration, Fritz did a nice repaint job to the motor—re-branding it with a Johnson 50 sticker, since that’s essentially what it was—and replacing a few basics for reliability—plugs, fuel pump and giving it a good general going over. The motor ran great for a few weeks, and much fun was had with it. But one day, as summer break began, it started sputtering and bogging under load and limping back home with a frustrated driver. The Hull Truth yielded a plethora of possibilities. Spark. Fuel. Air. Well, it’s getting all of these. Maybe the plug wires are arcing—check ‘em running in the dark to see. Nope, not it. Look, a coil pack has a crack in it. OK, let’s replace the coil packs. Nope. Well, let’s rebuild the carbs. Nope—still losing power after warm up. Maybe it’s the power pack. New CDI units aren’t too expensive and it can’t be a bad idea to replace that anyway. Wellllll, that seemed to work—for a few days. Then a frustrated tow back to the house from a buddy. A simple two stroke? Right.
Summer was now nearly through—and none of us had been able to enjoy the boat like we’d hoped. And every time the McKee went out, even if we ultimately got her running like a top, there would be anxiety over whether there’d be a frustrated call from the water. It would be one thing if we lived in a place with fairly benign weather, or maybe on a lake that didn’t feature ripping tidal currents much of the time. But you think about these things when you live in Charleston, where there’s every chance you’ll have to outrun a pop-up thunderstorm, or your kid could literally get swept out through a channel into the ocean while running from Kiawah to the Limehouse Bridge.
Keeping the McKee reliably powered by her vintage outboard was a noble experiment. Fritz learned a ton wrenching on the Johnnyrude. But throwing parts at the motor was getting expensive and mighty time consuming—time that would have been better spent on the water. After all, we weren’t living in 1996 when you could walk into any outboard shop and get any OMC part under the sun—and have any technician instantly troubleshoot when a fix was needed. But in the second decade of the 2000’s, that’s just not the case. Most techs today are used to scan-tooling an issue and don’t want to work on an old two-stroke, no matter how well-sorted it is. And most parts have to be ordered online. Any owner of vintage machinery can relate. It’s planned obsolescence at work.
Eventually, we trial and error’d the problem to the stator. And once that repair was done, the ‘Rude decided to run well. But even so, was this the motor for serious time zooming across our sketchy inlets? When fall came around last year, Fritz asked if he could put his summer salary towards something more modern. I talked it over with my wife. Since we wanted to use the McKee too, we offered to make up the difference if a used four stroke was found that fit the bill. Soon, a longtime mechanic buddy found a smoking deal on a smoke-free, fuel-injected Yamaha 60.
When we winched the Yammie onto the McKee, it fired right away and idled like it wasn’t there. On the water, a four-blade prop quickly planed the heavy old hull and heavier four stroke. Once the height was dialed in, she’d top out a knot or so slower than the ‘Rude, but she just runs and runs—burning half the fuel. In short, she now has a dream motor.
In the end, Fritz could have kept the old ‘Rude and had a neat old motor on a cool old boat that he could proudly say he saved from planned obsolescence. Or, he could have a cool old boat with a modern powerplant to run hard every damn day with his friends—or tow a broken down boat home with. I think he chose wisely.
Read more about Fritz’s boat here >>
This article originally appeared in the February 2026 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
