On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:45:45 GMT, "padeen"
wrote:

If you do try this route, I'd suggest arms back to a flat piece for the
motor coming from pivots on the gunwhales, with some form of adjustable
stops to vary the prop's bite.

Adjustable stops seems a definite good idea.

Any more of the motor down into the water
beyond the anti-cavitation plate increases its drag exponentially.

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks! The cavitation plate (such as it is)
on this little motor is directly above the prop, so if I only just
submerge the plate, the prop will only be about 3" below the
surface... At the moment, I have it set at about 13" below the
surface. Less efficient, perhaps, but it does make the whole
motor+boat more stable (less top-heavy).

Personally, I think the side mount would work fine, and be a good deal less
trouble, but this world is built on "bad" ideas that turn out to be
earth-shatteringly effective!

A side mount is what I now have. I built it a few days ago from teak
offcuts and tested it at the weekend. It does work, but I have to
surmise that the setup is not as efficient as it would be if the prop
was behind the stern, aimed along the boat's center line. Obviously,
that's because when the prop is off to one side, it's going to be
expending some proportion of its energy in trying to make the boat
turn towards the opposite side. I guess a quick fix (but not an
efficient one) would be simply to clamp the motor-mount bracket on
slightly skew, so that the direction of the prop is aimed slightly
inwards of dead-ahead.

I suspect the effort in building an in-line motor mount would be quite
a money-saver in the long-run, since gasoline costs about $8.50 a
gallon over here.

Unfortunately, as you pointed out, there would be some safety and
comfort issues in that the controls on the motor will be much harder
to reach (unless I remove the rear seat so I can move right back into
the stern when using the motor). But that may not be a good idea
beacause I think the seat may be needed to brace the hull.

So perhaps I'll just leave things as they are (for now, at least).
Paying a few pennies more for gasoline, per trip, is not a big deal,
after all. And I am, at least, getting good overall speed from the
side-mounted motor (seemed like about 15 knots to me - with the bow
out of the water).

Regards,

Al Deveron