Trolling Motor Mount

(click on any photo for a larger view)

Design Considerations

The Minn-Kota Endura 30 trolling motor is designed for transom mounting. I decided not to mount it on the "transom" for three reasons:

• This would have put all of the weight (motor and battery = 66 pounds) at the stern, significantly skewing the weight distribution of the load on the boat.
• Steering while running the motor would have required a very uncomfortable twisting of my body.
• Interference between the motor control head and the battery would have made it difficult to tilt the motor completely out of the water in shallows and during launching.

Of course, for bow mounting, the stock motor would have had the control tiller/handle pointing in the wrong direction. It turned out that fixing this was the easy part. One bolt holds the control head to the shaft. I removed the bolt, turned the control head 180 degrees, and reinstalled the bolt.

However, mounting the motor on the end of the footrest on the bow of the boat introduces significant additional stresses on the footrest poles -- not just the extra weight, but substantial torques:

• When raised out of the water, the 15 pound motor head at the end of the 2' shaft, torques down on the footrest.
• While running the motor at maximum thrust (30 pounds), this force, again at the end of the 2' shaft, torques up on the footrest.

The solution was two-fold:

• Additional supports were provided to shorten the effective "lever-length" of the long, stock footrest poles.
• The motor mount itself was designed to rigidly grip the end of the footrest at both corners.

Footrest Reinforcements

In the photos below, you can see a close-up of the footrest reinforcements, and a wide-angle view that shows them in the full context of the boat. The reinforcements were made from 1/2" PVC tees and 1/2" PVC pipe. The free ends of the pipe rest very conveniently in the molded-in indentions in the pontoons (the same indentions that hold the stock cargo rack at the stern of the boat).

Motor Mount

In the photo to the left, you can see how the motor mount is a sandwich that surrounds the end pole of the footrest. Since the boards are 3/4" thick, but the pole is 7/8" in diameter, the center board was laminated to a piece of 1/8" plywood from the hobby store to bring it up to the correct thickness. In the photos below, you can see how the two outside boards were drilled/cut to grip the lengthwise footrest poles.

In Operation

The photo to the left shows the trolling motor in the normal running position. You can also see the footrest reinforcements and the top of the fish-finder transducer mount.

The photos below show two views of the trolling motor in the stowed position.

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