Share Your Innovations

[dsafety]

Originally Posted by Dirty Curti

I made a video of my in-hull transducer mount. Please take a look and share your thoughts. Thanks.

In-Hull Transducer Mount

That is a nice implementation of the "wet mount". Several other versions have appeared in this thread over the years. A variant which I have used for the past 5 plus years is the "grease mount". Basically you build a small reservoir and glue it to the inside of the hull.

Fill the bottom 1/2" with high-temp marine grease and push your transducer into the grease until it bottoms out on the hull. Be careful not to trap any air bubbles. Strap the transducer under a little pressure, to the reservoir with a compressible piece of rubber, (EVA, the stuff that flip flop sandals are made of works great).

The main advantage of the grease mount is that you do not have to worry about the reservoir ever going dry. The grease will stay in the reservoir even when stored upside down in a 115 degree garage.

Both of these methods work well for simple sonar transducers which can transmit and receive through the hull without a problem. As I just learned, the more recent transducers have added downscan and even sidescan. Those signals get messed up by the plastic hull.

Many of the newer boats have transducer pockets in the bottom of the hull which allow for mounting modern transducers in an exterior location where they do not have broadcast through any plastic. This is a great innovation IMO but if you have an older boat, (like my 2008 Revo), you will have to get a little creative if you want to get the most out of the current batch of fish finders.

One way to mount your transducer so it has an unobstructed view of the water below is to use a transducer arm that hangs over the edge of your yak. I have just completed my installation using this method and will be writing a post soon. (I have to check things out on the water before I can be confident that my installation is worth talking about, so please be patient.)

Spoiler alert. I usually build most of my mods from ABS or PVC pipe but for this project, it turns out that both Scotty and Ram offer relatively inexpensive transducer arms. I ended up with the Scotty and am quite pleased. More on this later.

Bob