I want a 4 stroke, but ive herd the sho blows powerheads like crazy. Makes me nervous . What motor would you have?

This should be a fun post

Get a SHO and enjoy. Mine is 3 years old and never missed a beat.
The first year they had some bugs but they have long been fixed.

I had Mercury on my previous two boats. The last was Z522 2012 250 Pro XS. The one before that was a 2004 Opti 225 on a VX 521. I have a 250 Sho now on a 921 Phoenix I bought new back in Oct. This is my take, the Mercury is a good motor and I have no complains with either one. The Mercury will resale better at this time I believe. I was scare of the Sho to for the same reason, but I got to talk to a couple motor guys at different boat dealers and they said the same thing. The Sho had problems the first couple of years but now they run great. They both did say you need to run the Sho hard for the break in to seat the rings, this is were the problems come, the rings do not get seat right so they let gas by and into the oil. This is what they call making oil and what the problem is. The oil gets deluded and takes the bearing out which blows the motor. The way you keep this from happening is getting the temperature up to seat the rings in the first 10 hours. I have close to 100 hours and my motor has never made oil. just my .02 good luck

Thats some very intersting info , i was set on the sho until the dealer told me 6 out of 10 sho motors will blow and he is a yamaha and merc dealear. Im kinfa leaning towards the pro xs now....

Pro XS for me, the SHO seems to be a good engine, I just like black and speed.

I do not know the true numbers but I would have a hard time believing that 6 of 10 are blowing for this reason. I think because of how many Skeeter's are on fork, if that was really the number they couldn't give away Skeeter's and we would spent all of our time towing them to shore. I know they had big problems in the beginning and I am sure their is still a few but nothing like 6 of 10. just my .02

The dealer is an idiot. If 6 out of 10 sho motors blew up Yamaha Marine would be out of business, Skeeter would be too.
Also if you want to see which has the best resale value go to Bass Boat Central and look at used boat pricing. The boats with SHO on them are all higher than with Mercury. They are both great motors but don't let rumors or bs make your decision.

Merc

It wasn't just the first couple years. My buddy lost the powerhead on his 2014 this spring. I believe it is more to do with how they are broke in. There may be some truth to what those mechanics said. If you do buy a SHO make sure you do exactly what Yamaha says to do during breakin. I know from racing that the new synthetics are so good even Chevrolet had trouble with ring seat on a lot of the Corvette engines. On our race engines we ran them on the dyno with conventional oil and switched to synthetic on race day. If you don't seat the rings I can see blowing gas by the rings therefore "making" oil. And any time you dilute oil you will have bearing trouble. I've personally seen some of the new SHO's go many hours with no problems and when you talk to them they will tell you they followed breakin to the letter and keep up on the maintenance. So I wouldn't be scared to buy either if I was buying new but would worry if I bought used.JMHO

Two months ago, Bass Angler Magazine did a product review on the 250 SHO compared to the Merc and Evinrude.
They were impressed and the overall power and hole shot beat the other two hands down.
I bought a new Skeeter with the 250 SHO and love it. It is a beast

I own Two bass boats, one with a SHO thats on the third powerhead, and one with a Mercury thats never had a wrench put on it, with that being said I really like the SHO and Yamaha is figuring it out, I have 20hrs on the current powerhead and Yamaha told me Do Not run synthetic oil unti I have 100 hrs on it to insure that the rings seat properly. And no a SHO will not run with a Mercury,

Go with the sho!

You want a 4 stroke check out the Verado Pro that thing is supposed to be a beast.