I got my 15 hp Johnson running and now and working on my Mercury 25. 70s model I would guess. Has not been run in a couple of years.

I unscrewed this fuel filter from its' mount and it had some oily gas smelling looking stuff in the bottom of it. You can see some of it in there. My question is this....should it be screwed back in to the housing dry or should there be some clean oil or something in the bottom of the filter bowl. With the center section being just a screen, I can't see how an oil bath type set up would work, but what do I know.

THANKS for your help.  If you can't see the entire pic, just click on the pic a couple of times and it will come up full size.

clean all that stuff out and put it back on, it's just some old mix of oil/water/old gas/ etc.  also check the gas tank & lines to see if there is any of this in those also, if so clean them out. if you know how to take off the float bowls off the carb clean that out also, but if it's FI then run some cleaner through those.

Thank you sir.  Cleaned it out and fueled it up and got it started after 5 pulls!  Had not been cranked in about 3 years. Smoked a lot upon starting. No telling what was gunked up in there.

Now that I know the motor runs, I can concentrate on getting it tweaked out.

Try adding an ounce of Star-Tron to every tankful of gas.  Your gunk problem will go away forever.