199 One of the reasons I switched to Yamaha's is that all the V6's since the 80's anyway, and maybe all of their engines dunno for sure - use a gravity feed secondary oil tank located on the side of the engine. You may lose a pump in the main resovior but you will still have oil to the engine. As a matter of fact, the default position in the on board computer sends a signal to the pump that reads empty, causing the pump to overload the gravity bottle. When this happens you will get a warning signal either on the instruments or a buzzer I'm told. I had this computer fail one time on the old '88 modle Yammer with us 12 miles from the ramp in Rockport and blowing oil smoke as the plugs were fouling out like we were on fire. If I had known to simply disconnect the plug in on the computer instead of banging on it we could have saved a bad day at sea...but the engine was never in jepeordy like the time my Johnson's VRO failed about the same distance across Texoma from home. The Johnson would start to seize up and die and it never occurred to me to look at the oil tank since the buzzer never sounded. We limped home, I pulled everything apart and discovered the low oil problem and filled the tank... and then the stupid alarm went off like an alarm clock ding ding ding. Had a dealer do a compression test and found a scuffed wall on one cylinder and a little lower than average PSI on that cylinder but still within range... I'll never forget the mechanic's statement though.... He said " If this had been a Merc or anything else the powerhead would have been fried...but becuase these engines are as loose to begin with as they are you got really lucky..." Not the kind of praise I wanted to hear but it was a very used engine when I bought it so who knows. I ran it another year with no problems and sold and never heard any complaints from the buyer.
I've owned a brand new 89'110 VRO (which was re rated to 115 in the same engine in '90)and then this '88 model 150 VRO,never liked either one of them. Poor fuel mileage, cold natured and hard to start, flooded easily, and always fouled the plugs trolling. Everything my Yamaha's have not been. So I will keep looking at Yammer's or maybe a Honda I guess when it's time to get another one.
Ron