How to install a trolling motor on a kayak ( Shadow caster)

what is up guys welcome back to another episode of Big Pig fishing and today we're gonna show you how I put my Charlie water on the back of the shadow caster all right as you can see guys we're back into the man cave with the kayak if you can't tell it's pretty gross outside here in Michigan that's why we're doing a lot of our videos inside it's snowy cold nasty so I brought it inside so that we could get some really good coverage of what we did here so initially I we had a couple nice winter breaks I think two or three days it was like sixty degrees no snow nice and sunny so I was able to take this outside and get it all set up and painted as I put it all together and got a couple of imperfections in my paint job so I do got to go back through and repaint this as a whole unit so don't pick fun at some of the imperfections of the paint job we're gonna work on that all right so to keep this video on track simple and informational I'm gonna break this down into a few different parts I'm gonna break it down into the motor mounting steering power and cables so five different parts and we're gonna try to touch base on each different part so I don't miss anything and you guys can get a little bit more of a breakdown in each different section because that's basically how I installed this trolling motor was in those different steps if you all right so step one we're gonna talk about the trolling motor and how I fabricated this trolling motor to fit better on the back of the kayak and be a little bit more functional so this is the motor guide machete - it's a 55 pound trust motor and it is it is heavy guys and if I didn't have this motor on hand already I would have went with a 30 pound trolling motor because of how much heavier this is than a 30 pounder but I already have this on hand I was trying to do this as cheap as possible but still do a nice job and I think this will be fine I mean I do have a heavy kayak it's pretty boy and it holds up to 450 pounds if you haven't seen the review video on this go ahead and check that out I'll leave the link here in the description I mean anyway starting off I just took the head unit off of the trolley motor it was a standard hand controlled charlie motor so I just took the head unit off and I cut this shaft down to an ideal height that I believed would work the reason why I said believe will work is because I don't know the depth that I need this trolling motor to be at so I did leave a bit of a gap here between the top of my elbow here and the bottom of my holder so I do have room to fluctuate if I do you do but all in all if this setting works for me I really like the way that looks it doesn't stick up very high and it looks it looks professional my opinion so that's the trolling motor in a sense and then what I just did is I topped it off with this I think it's a 3/4 inch PVC elbow with a little fitting in in here and I just drilled it's kinda hard to see sorry drilled right in here and run this cable protector tubing just right inside that so keeps it nice and watertight alright next we're gonna talk about mounting this trolling motor on to the kayak itself and this to me was the hardest part of this entire install and I went through a couple different ideas before I finally found one that I see fit so at first as you can see these holes here I utilized I had set of outriggers on here when I first bought the kayak that I installed myself was my first modification and I haven't showed you guys that yet and I will eventually so I went into these holes and I put L brackets that went up and and so like that and then I had a piece of wood in the back here basically I can like the back of a John boat or you know a normal boat and then this just crimped right on to it and it hung like a normal a trolling motor the issue with that is it was putting a lot of stress on this plastic right here and I was afraid that if I hit something that it could potentially damage or rip this right out because that was the only place that was anchored on to the kayak so I scrapped that idea and started over and basically came up with this solution by watching a youtube video and I don't know the name of the youtuber who did and I can't find the video again so I can't give him credit but basically I took two pieces of wood inside this molded handle and basically sandwiched it together between the handle while including this part of the mount of the trolling motor and I'll explain a little bit more in detail so I took these five inch bolts drilled all the way down between two pieces of wood that I had traced out to fit perfectly inside this mold here and basically just attached it to the bottom with another bolt tightened it up really good and it sandwich those two together between this handle to hold it on there and obviously this part of the trolling motor is bolted on so it's with it and what that did was I didn't have to drill any more holes into the kayak if I ever want to take this off and have a perfectly normal kayak again I can yeah we'll be no holes drilled into the handle I don't want to ramble too much about this mount but it was the hardest part of this setup so I just wanted to touch base pretty clearly on it and basically from there I ended up cutting off the screw lock bolts there's bolts that go in here that tighten this all the way up to this bracket I just cut those off and this is just kind of how it sits this is permanently attached to the kayak this will always be here unless of course I take this off but I'm staying for my personal use that's always gonna be on the kayak all right so hopefully this camera angles pretty good by myself right now so I'm having a hard time kind of doing camera work but anyway that's my dog say hello done anyway so the way that this sits right here there was a pin that runs through right here where I have this wingnut and it was a permanent bolt that was kind of welded in there and that is what helps this slipper it swivels on that bolt so I thought if I could drill this out and put a bolt in there with a with a wingnut why can't I use that as the anchor point to come on and off because I wanted to be able to take my trolling motor off when I'm not using it if I'm fishing a tournament that isn't loud trailing motors or whatever the case may be or I just want to go River floating with some buddies that I can take those trolling motor off and essentially have a basic kayak again so what I did was that is what these carabiners they're for and we'll go over that when we go over steering but I just undo this bolt right here the wingnut slides off obviously we've got to put a little pressure up because of the weight of the child water of course can you pull it off can you undo your Clips here your carabiners for your steering linkage we'll go over that and then my wire for my cable once again I'll go over there and then this just slides right up and off and out of the way and then these cables will slide up and then this is all that's left on the kayak and that doesn't weigh anything more than you know it would matter and it's secured on there and it just looks like a normal guy a key and kind of a cool little fin looked if you if you don't mind me pointing in so yeah that is how I mounted this and this kind of gives you a better look of basically how I sandwich this I guess between these two pieces of wood alright so next we're going to get into a little bit more fun part I understand that the mount and the motor was a little bit boring but hopefully it was informative so this is going to be the steering linkage and how I steer this motor when I'm up front in the driver's seat obviously I took off my handle so I can't just reach back and turn it so I introduced this foot pedal lever mechanism and it's very similar to that of a higher end kayak for the red ring system it just consists of cables that hook to a joint and use leverage to turn your motor or in their case a rudder so first off I just took this galvanized steel circle if you will I'm not exactly sure what it's called I found it at Ace Hardware and it just fits right over the shaft tightens down with an Allen on the back and I pre-drilled and then tapped 5/16 for these eye bolts into this steel and off those eye bolts like I said these are six inch eye bolts and I just hope these carabiners to it and as I showed you the carabiners are specifically for taking off my motor and to the carabiner I'm running these this is three thirty-seconds galvanized steel cable and that runs all the way up to my foot pedals will still get up there in a second but inside here see if I can bring it closer from there a galvanized steel cable runs into this quarter inch tubing and inside the tubing is a little brass fitting that's got the brass fitting as an outer diameter of a quarter inch obviously to go inside the quarter inch plastic tubing and what that the purpose of that is is when this is going back and forth from steering it's not going to cut into the side of the kayak or put any abrasions in there when this is turning in and out so that's basically just to prevent any damage from the kayak because I mean this could use a hacksaw or you'd be used as a hacksaw if you know what I mean so I just took some precaution there and put that brass fitting in there alright so moving up we have the tube from the back that comes right up here and I ran that underneath all the way here just right underneath everything and in a previous video I showed you guys how to install this hatch into the back of these shadow casters and the reason I did this hatch was for this trolling motor mod so if you haven't seen that video that'll be linked up in the corner here and this is an essential part of this and we'll get into this as wires but I use this hole to be able to feed that tubing through the front in the back so essential anyway the wire or the side yes the cable and the tubing come all the way up here drill the hole right here next to my secret and poked out the rubber the rubber tubing with the steel cable and the purpose of the rubber tubing is if any water does happen to get inside this little brass fitting which it will then it kind of does like a drip effect and will drip into the inside the kayak and it'll just run right off into the into the scupper holes so that's the idea and no water can really get into the hall if it's running through this tubing and then the steel cable just comes up here and clips to the end of my foot pedal switch here and this switch just basically locks the football or unlocks the foot pedal and once again check out the review video it kind of further explains that and from there it unlocked I could kind of show you guys how this thing operates so just like a leverage pulley system you push up the other ones gonna come back right you push up the other ones gonna come back and it's like butter alright next we'll kind of talk about the wearing up of the motor so there's four wires that come out of the shaft of your trolling motor when you take off your head unit and that's going to be a red black yellow and blue wire for this specific modification I only utilized the red and black wire so the red and black wire come out and attach to this it's a mini Kota receptacle and you can buy them off Amazon that's like 40 bucks for the pair of them and basically it's just a plug so you mount the plug onto your kayak flips open noise waterproof and when you connect it and obviously creates your circuit so from there I ran my Cape my red and black cable all the way inside the kayak all the way up to the top and here's where we get to the battery and some of the components for the battery now if you look real close you could see that the battery is slightly at an angle and the reason for that is because of the Tri Hall effect here in the girdle there in the hall it works perfectly for just mounting or setting the battery inside kind of at an angle and it holds it in this battery isn't going anywhere and before you guys freak out or have any concerns I did talk to some professionals it is fine to store the battery at an angle even on the side sometimes and it's not gonna affect anything it's not dangerous so from there though the wires right up from the top or from the back of the kayak all the way up inside the hall to this RF switch and from this RF switch it kind of just piggy backs off into the battery so this is just your standard marine battery this is 625 deep-cycle marine battery nothing special 60 70 bucks at Walmart but what I want to talk to you about is this RF switch the purpose of this is so that I can turn on and off my trolling motor from inside the seat right I don't have any handle to turn on and off so I need to be able to start and shut off my chilly motor and I was thinking that instead of just having a switch that says on and off I need to go in reverse to right so I picked up this reverse polarity switch and what it does is reverse the pull of power so now I can also flip the circuit to basically tell the motor that it needs to go in reverse and I'll show you how that works in a second so what's nice about this is I just put a little piece of velcro on the bottom here and I went into this flat spot inside so this just goes right up and under onto this and just GoPros on there and I have no issues with that coming off and that just sits right inside the hall of the kayak in the front edge so this is the reverse polarity remote control that operates my trolling motor when I'm in this seat so obviously there's two different functions forward and reverse and for operation you click once and it keeps the motor on click it again to shut it off click it once for reverse click it again to shut it off very very simple very effective so there's a couple of options I could have done for power one of them was the obviously the reverse polarity switch and the second one was a speed control switch and the speaker's choice which is basically a little unit that you would mount somewhere reachable up here and you turn the switch as a dial to 1 between 1 and 5 and then reverse so it acts just like the operation system of the normal kayak so you could do a speed control so you could slower to faster however you wanted I did not want to go that route for a couple different reasons the main reason would be drilling another hole somewhere up here to have that pretty much permanently installed there I'm not exactly sure what modifications I'm planning on doing with this eventually I'm gonna upgrade kayaks anyway so I wanted to keep permanent modifications a little more simple so I just went with the reverse polarity switch the reason why I chose this also over the speed control switch is I'm not planning on trolling spot to spot the purpose of the kayak motor for me was that I could make runs to different spots on the lake real quickly so you know I'm at my at the dock and you know ready to go turn it on effortlessly troll all the way to where I need to be cut it off paddle around the area for a little bit with my paddle and need to make another run you know very simple this is just for making runs basically getting me to the spots a little quicker making me a little bit more efficient on the water thank you so much for watching hopefully this video helped you and inspired you to do a trolling motor to install yourself if you have any questions leave them down in the comments below and remember I'm proud of you

Channel: Pig Fishing

Views: 40,694

Keywords: Kayak, Fishing, Shadow Caster, Troling motor, How to install a trolling motor, kayak trolling motor, Pig Fishin

Id: 78-5alitVk4

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020