I remember a Chinese outboard a couple years back that was diesel, too.
It had a horizontal shaft engine with a belt drive to a pulley on the
pedestal it sat on and there must have been right angle drive gears top
and bottom of the vertical shaft. Very queer looking cheap outboard.
Probably they run 20 years in the Chinese swamplands powering sampans
full of stuff...(c;

Sounds like the same thing they've got for sale now.... While i havent seen
one close up, from pictures they look like a horzontal shaft engine intended
for use as a pump/generator with probably a bevel gear then driving a shaft
down to another bevel gear with a cheap plastic looking prop on it. Id have
a hard time saying how long they'd last, but surely not 20 years! They
probably would last a lot longer in a flat freshwater environment than out
in the ocean though ;-)

I remember the "outboards" in Asia. Horizontal shaft engine hanging
inside the boat with a long drive shaft with a prop on the end of it.
The engines were air cooled...no cooling problems. To steer it, they
tillered the whole thing to change the center of thrust on the
stern....and they would FLY down the river.

The rich call them "surface drives"....(c;

I've seen those too! I hired a long boat up the mekong to Laos a couple of
years ago, it was a blast. These things sure are cheap, and for an insane
moment i thought of buying one, fitting it out and living there for a while.
You can get the long boats new for around US$500. The engines are usually
ripped out of cars, little 3 cylinder or sometimes 4 cylinder jobs. The
shaft is literally bolted/welded onto the flywheel with a prop bolted onto
the other end. The engine itself sits on a heavy hinge, so they helmsman
can tilt it up out of the water easily in the shallows, and have control
over depth at all times. They have some dinky other inventions there too, I
saw a setup on another boat (maybe a crab boat?) which had most of the
driveline of a car on it; engine, gearbox, driveshaft, rear axle (im
guessing the spider gears on the diff were welded) and a rim on each axle.
These were used to pull lines in.

Life can be too much fun, i need another adventure!
Shaun