rolmops

I know nothing about bondo fibre glass. The closed cell foam is a different story. there is an easy alternative to the liquid stuff. It is the big BLUE foam boards you can get at Lowes. I capitalized blue, because blue is a closed cell material. Buy a board and cut it in the desired pieces,shove it in and make sure it does not move around. This can be done cheap and easy.

The wood being open means that it will be very easy to replace. I just took it for granted that it was all closed in. But now it looks like you just may want to take the splash box out, cut the foam away, replace the wood and put new fresh foam in. Just make sure to put in closed cell foam, regular styrofoam will soak up water like a sponge and make things very heavy

It is just as reliable as marine plywood. I did an Islander transom with marine ply and another with seacast. The seacast took half the time and is probably stronger than the ply. The Islanders have roughly an 8 foot wide and 4 foot deep transom. On the picture it shows that you have an outboard so you probably have a smaller transom like 8 foot wide but only 2 foot deep so you can get away with 1 marine plywood board, which will save you easily $200. There are a lot of youtubes showing how it is done. It seems to be expensive when you see the price, but 2 boards of 3/4 inch marine ply, the proper epoxy to glue them together and then seal them end up to be about the same price and they will rot again sooner or later. Just do not try to glue or pour in cold weather it does not work well. By the way, It is a good idea to put safety above catching a few browns and maybe ending up on the bottom of the lake

You can probably get all the wood out without having to take the entire transom housing apart. It is done with a very long drill that you keep on inserting and cleaning up as you go. If that works, and you have the space cleaned out, you can just rebuild your transom by pouring a liquid transom maker like Seacast or Carbon Bond that you can pour in from the top. It will harden up inside your housing and after cleaning up and putting things back together , you are good to go. You can only do this if you have a heated inside space to work.

And for good reason. The group that I fish with usually rents a place in Olcot for a week. It makes for a lot more action. Besides, it is sort of a yearly tradition to start the season.

The only reason why I mentioned Mayers is their gas service. They would probably pump a lot more gas thus making it worth their while.

You have a good point. Either the entrepreneur who runs this competition will have to provide weigh-in stations lake wide, or, at the very least have all weigh-in stations open and close at the same time. I do not really believe that these things will happen, but it would level the playing field

Trout man is absolutely trustworthy

This is a little better. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WVgHss3x11yzuxA21aDYDwF0HfugJb8e/view

Thank you. I have used the tiny tach on all my engines. I love them. As for manuals, I forced myself to read this one. I was not very impressed. It seems to be an effort to send you off to a Suzuki dealer for every little pip squeek. This down below is a bit more helpful. At least it has a few wiring diagrams https://www.danssouthsidemarine.com/fckimages/pdfs/owners-manuals/Suzuki%20DF9.9b-15a-20a.pdf It is still nowhere near a manufacturers service manual of the sort that Mercury and Johnson/Evinrude used to print out, but at least it has some wiring diagrams. If I chance upon a proper service manual I will send it on to you.

Maybe ,just maybe you can talk Allison ,Bills daughter, at Mayers Marina into this. I suspect that she will decline but you never know.

I took advantage of this nice warm winter day, put the aluminum bracket on the panther and bolted it down. Removing the outboard was a lot easier than I thought because by lowering the bracket, the outboard made it all the way down to the ground so there was no lifting involved. Afterwards I put the kicker back on the bracket and punched marker holes on the aluminum where the extra bolts holding the kicker in place. A few days from now when the temperatures go above freezing again I will remove the aluminum plate and tap the threads into the aluminum so I can just screw the holding bolts into the aluminum, clean them out, put some locktite in there and screw everything down. Thank you very much for all the valuable help and advice you gave me. It probably saved me from having to wash my mouth with soap several times over.

Yes. That is a very accurate description of what I will have to figure out. It all seems simple, but I foresee problems partly because there always is the 125 pounds outboard that has to maneuvered around. I'm considering breaking the cherry picker out although I do not yet know how to attach it without scratching up the nice new outboard.

The bolts that attach the aluminum plate to the panther plate do not have to be countersunk. Here I can just take out the original bolts and use longer ones instead. It is the bolts that lock the suzuki to the aluminum plate that will have to be countersunk because the bracket that I have is 11.5 inches wide and the width of the Suzuki bracket is about 9 inches. I plan to countersink the bolts so the aluminum plate will sit flush on the bracket plate with the bolt ends coming out towards the Suzuki bracket

The plate on my bracket is 11.5 x12.75 so it is wider than yours. It is about 2 inches wider than the Suzuki transom bracket. I worry a bit about the whole thing hanging on 4 1/4 inch bolts I will check out McMaster Carr for the hardware.

Thank you all for your advice. I was very interested in the electric hydraulic bracket and looked it up They look very sturdy and attractive. The prices vary wildly. Amazon offers them for $1800+ while boaters world has the same one for a bit over $1200. But I already have the T&T on the kicker itself so it would be overkill. The other idea of using a 1/4 inch aluminum plate seems to be the solution that may work for me. It is easier than a complete bracket rebuild. The only problem I see is the room for bolts if you want them to be flush backed up against the original bracket. I looked in my garage and found a 1/2 inch thick aluminum plate. I just finished cutting it to the exact size of the bracket and with the rotor router made nice edges on it With the half inch thickness it will be easy to drill taper bolt holes that allow the bolts to sit flush and therewith the plate to sit flush up against the original bracket. Thank you very much for your ideas. It is a great help.