TOPIC: 1966 Evinrude Starflite 100 s cylinder temp??????

hi i am new to this site but i really hope that someone can help me, i have a 66 starflite 100 s that was given to me by my father in law, the engine runs and will push the 17' tri haul thinderbird that it is mounted to. but now to my questions, the first question is: when at an idle water only spitts out of the water/exhaust port. but as the engine revs the water spits out a little more but never flows out. my second question is that cylinders 2 and 4 get warm to the touch after the engine runs for a little while but yet cylinders 1 and 3 stay ice cold. does anyone know where i should start to look. i am not possotive if i am getting fire on the 2 cold clyinders but my guess is that they are firing beacause i dont think the engine would run on only the 2 and 4 cylinders. the engine does run kinda rough at lol rpms but it does run. i may be wrong about it not being able to run on only the 2 cylinders. please guys i need some help with this.

There are those who know more than I but they haven't chimed in yet.

The engine will kind of run on two cylinders. You can check if the the cold cylinders are firing by unplugging the sparkplug wire, if no change in performance then they're not. Pull the sparkplugs to see if they're oily and if they're getting spark. Sparkplugs are cheap, good practice to replace them anyway. Get NGKs.

The idle speed needles are in a vertical line on the front of the engine, they control only the idle, so if the engine smooths out at speed you might want to look at those. High speed is set internally and not adjustable.

Seems to me that not firing on one side can also be a sign of a faulty power pack, but we'll hope that's not the case. Blown head gaskets are not unheard of and take about 15 minutes to replace. I usually replace the points and condenser in any old motor.

ok guys, i finally got the engine to fire on all 4 cylinders. after replacing my battery terminals due to being old and one of them broke off, and re soldering one of the brushes back to the starter, and adjusting the points to .020 now my question is how do i make sure the engine is in perfect time as it should be. after adjusting the points the engine runs WAY better and smokes so much less then what it was. but it still just has that sound like it is not running at its full and best. if you guys could help i would be greatly appreciated.