Bought the boat with the 1986 75HP Mercury

I bought the boat with the 1986 75HP Mercury. The serial number is 0A994929.

The good:
The owner's son (owner deceased) said the carbs were last put up "dry."
Turns out it has tilt/trim. One may have been installed by the dealer.
Paint on the motor, including the lower end, looks as good in person as it did in the pictures.
New Prop
Steering cables still move reasonably smoothly consider the age of the grease.
Motor control (correct name?) appears in good shape.
I have all the notes the original owner had as well as all owner's manuals

The bad:
In the notes, I found where the boat had problems with the tilt/trim when new. No notes related to the dealer correcting it.
The boat has a while tail mounted and I'm not sure why it was needed. Hopefully the tilt/trim works.
A dirt dobber wasp built a nest in the cowling on top of a wire, causing the wire to corrode and fall apart. I'll likely have to replace that work in order to crank the engine and test the compression.
The boat was kept in a fresh water lake, so there is some water related corrosion to deal with.
Everything is filthy and moldy on the boat and motor controls.

Some questions:
Where do I look to find the model?
Good website to get a service manual from?
Would I be better off letting the dealer handle the check out? His quote for doing this (not including replacing that corroded wire) is 85 to 100 bucks.

Thanks for your help,

Dave

Hey Dave,
Hopefully you found a dimond in the ruff!

The guys over at https://www.bbcboards.net/zeroforum?id=53 are great and should be able to help you out with all of your questions. I had a 225 EFI, and the guys on the 3.0lt section basicly had a a good answear for all of my questions, and I had alot..

Good luck and have fun!!

Thanks for the link Sean. I used to read that website,but lost the link in the crash. I posted a question in that forum.

My dad had a bass boat for years that he eventually gave to me that was I think had an '84 or '85 75hp Mercury on it. I beat that thing to hell as a kid and it ran like a champ for 20 years. I sold it about 2 years ago because the fiberglass boat had a rotten transom on it. The motor would stall out occasionally when tilted way up, but other than that STILL ran great.

I bought a Seloc manual from Amazon and it was a fairly decent manual. I recently sold it on EBay, so you might want to check there as well.

KRS