Trolling Motor Plugs

I noticed a lot of posts concerning trolling motors and batteries. I just read an article in the April 11th Outdoor News by Steve Carney. He recommends replacing your trolling motor plugs or terminal ends of your trolling motor that plug directly into your boat coupling. He says that as these plugs corrode, chances are you are getting only limited voltage to your electric motor. He says if your motor seems underpowered the culprit is probably the plug insert. I plan on changing mine out because last season my motor seemed underpowered – I thought it was my battery but I plan on changing plugs and see if that helps. I figured I would pass this on to the FTR gang.

Before replacing it you may want to try this;
Get one of the gun cleaning brushes in the .22 cal size and clean the terminal ends. I do the same thing with the trailer light plug-ins. This eliminates a lot of light problems I had in the past and should work well for the trolling motor as well.

Quote:

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chances are you are getting only limited voltage to your electric motor

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I don’t know that I buy that – what you are doing is forcing a ton of current through a bad or intermittent contact, which generates heat, rapidly, and with very poor dissipation. I had a contact burn up on me a couple years ago, and trust me an electrical fire in a boat is a bad, bad thing. I cut the plug off my TM and hard-wired it to the battery through a breaker.

The way I think about it is: A plug is a mechanical device, reliant on friction contact. It represents a single point of failure in the system that is easily eliminated. I can count the number of times I would have unplugged the TM since I’ve owned the boat on one hand, and just don’t see a plug as a great convenience over hard-wiring to justify the risk of failure.

I guess the bottom line is: When you’re dumb like me, simple is always better.

Hardwiring is a great idea. I hate those dang hard to wiggle in place plug ins anyhow.and am too cheap to upgrade to the slide and twist ones. What amp breaker did you use? Does it not bother when recharging with an onboard charger? Great idea!

50 amp. Shouldn’t bother a charger.

If you have your trolling motor hard wired in, then I am assuming you never take it off of the boat. I pull my trolling motor after each trip and secure it inside my locked garage. I lost a TM off my boat once and don’t want it to happen again. I like your idea but it just won’t work in my case.

Man is that bad news, sorry to hear it.

I leave it on the boat pretty much all the time. It sits in my backyard under a motion light, so I don’t worry about it. I wonder if you could drill the pins and bolts to install a lock of some kind? Might just make things worse if they have to tear up your boat to get it off, though.

My motor came with a four-prong twist plug. It’s a motorguide and was designed for Tracker boats, which must have that recepticle standard. The plug recepticle was about $40 from what I remember, and I had considered getting it just for the convenience. The down side would be that I would have had to rig up some sort of quick removal system for the baseplate also, and that just wasn’t going to happen easily.

You should be able to clean the male plug pretty easily with an emery cloth or a dremel tool, the recepticle, however, may not allow for cleaning. You could tear it off the boat and have a look, but most of them are non-serviceable.