The sole purpose of the mercury switch (on 1955 models) was to prevent operation of the electric starter at high throttle settings. Consider this possible scenario:.. You are cruising along at full throttle, and suddenly the motor quits because you ran out of gas. After a brief panic, you realize it is out of gas and connect your second gas tank, pump it up, and hit the starter button. The boat takes off at full throttle and maybe runs over something or somebody—or worse, tosses you out of the boat. Why??? Because when it ran out of gas and quit running, you didn’t think to retard the throttle and shift into neutral. So you started it in forward gear and full throttle. The mercury switch prevents that by disabling the starter till you retard the throttle (but it will still start in gear–at slow throttle setting)
As for the choke and associated wires, of course you can eliminate that—you will just have to use the manual choke knob to cold-start it.
