CONTINUOUSWAVE

What is a source for a water pump repair kit for a Bearcat engine?

If you have exhausted the usual sources ebay may be worth a look.

Q2: Is the water pump engine-mounted or in the lower unit?

If you need an impeller or seal McMaster Carr is worth a look.

In 2001 I wrote an article on the BEARCAT engines. See

https://continuouswave.com/whaler/refer ... arcat.html

At the time I wrote that article, a fellow named Ed Ewing in California was refurbishing and selling BEARCAT engines, and he had hundreds of them. But he was already 80-years-old. If Ed were still with us, he would be about 103-years-old, and I don't think he would still be operating his marine engine business. His domain name (4cyclemarine.com) is no longer active, and it now just points to a Homelite parts supplier.

The BEARCAT engines were a bit of an anachronism in 2001, so in 2024 they are now really antique relics.

If you discover a source for any parts for BEARCAT outboard engines, you are welcome to post in this thread any links to sources.

You may also be able to use the Internet Way Back Machine to look at Ed's website from c.2001 to see if there is any useful information. You can start your search at this URL:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030801000 ... marine.com

Some, if not all Homelite - Bearcat outboards used Crosley engines. Check vintage Crosley automobile parts suppliers for engine parts.

frontier wrote:Some, if not all Homelite - Bearcat outboards used Crosley engines.

The long history of how Powell Crosley's 1940's engine became the 1970's Fisher-Pierce BEARCAT engine is described in rather good detail in the article already mentioned and linked above, which has been available for the past 23-years on the website. I think anyone interested in the BEARCAT engine history would benefit from reading it.

Again, here is a hyperlink to that article:

Fisher-Pierce BEARCAT Engine
https://continuouswave.com/whaler/refer ... arcat.html

Also, the follow-on discussion of the above article contains two more abandoned websites whose information about the Homelite or Bearcat engines is still preserved by the good work of the Internet Way Back Machine at

http://web.archive.org/web/20040612162959/http://hometown.aol.com/homelite55/

and at

http://web.archive.org/web/20040602233858/http://members.aol.com/home4cycle/index.html

The thread that dates from 2001 that is mentioned in the reference article that discusses a bit more about these engines is still in the archives here at

Bearcat Outboard Reference Article
https://continuouswave.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000641.html

frontier wrote:Check vintage Crosley automobile parts suppliers for engine parts.

With regard to a replacement water pump, I suspect that a water pump intended for automotive use with the Crosley engine might not be appropriate for use in the BEARCAT outboard version. Typically an outboard engine water pump would be in the gear case assembly, and a gear case assembly would not be something manufactured necessarily by the original manufacturer of the engine, which in the case of a BEARCAT engine was an automobile manufacturer. For example, when automobile engine manufacturer Honda began to produced outboard engines, I think they initially used gear case assemblies made by another outboard engine maker, Mercury Marine. Honda is mentioned has having stopped using Mercury Marine gear cases in c.1998. Cf.:

https://www.marineengine.com/boat-forum/threads/need-honda-guru-model-year-interchangeability-lower-unit-bf90a.430119/

Because the engine was automotive I asked if the pump was engine or gear case mounted.

To learn the Bearcat had two pumps much like a typical sterndrive cooling system would not surprise me. We had a 260 Mercruiser sterndrive with closed cooling which had three water pumps. One was located in the drive, another internal to the engine for circulation, and the third was a belt drive raw water pump with a thru-hull to a heat exchanger.

Locating a repair parts source could be dictated by the type of pump needed.