Hobie Adventure Sounder Install

[2rsea]

Time has come for pimping to start on the adventure. First up was fitting the sounder off the kingy, a Garmin 300c. Trawled over millions of posts on other adventures & revo's (similar cockpit layout) on how others had put what where. Have only had her out once so had to think long & hard about where wouldn't be in the way or hard to see etc. Settled on mounting in the pockets as they were a happy medium between being easily seen & accessed but far enough away not to hinder landing of fish, short paddle strokes & so on. One requirement was having the unit quickly & easily removeable for transport & so it could be stashed inthe hull for surf launches & retrieves if I ever get game. Not having heaps of coin to throw at it scotty or Ram mounts were out of the question, then I remembered that I had fitted a berkley quickset holder on the kingy which was average as a rod holder but figured I could cannabilise & modify the parts to mount the sounder on, & at about $35 odd bucks pretty cheap too. Started by ditching altogether the actual rod "cradle" out of the swivel stem, then cut a piece of 25x25 ally SHS which fit perfectly between the flanges, just had to cut a couple of slots so the box section would sit low enough. I got one of my customers thru work to machine me a flat round disc for the sounders base to bolt to & welded it to the box section. At this point I realised I could probably mount my gps off to the side of the sounder by using the flush-mount screw holes on the sounder to fit a plate to the back & have a tang poking out one side. Agonised for ages on how to route the cabling thru the hull as the Garmin has 2 leads & requires a fair diameter hole to fit the lead & transducer plug. Eventually found I could file quite a bit off the shroud on the plug which meant I could squeeze it thru (just) a 20mm cable gland which is quite acceptable.
Battery storage was next, ended up gutting the partitions out of one of the hobie gearbuckets, screwing a piece of polyethylene sheet underneath to stiffen it up abit as it got quite flimsy with the partitions removed. Mounted a flat-type trailer plug to the bottom & she should be all go. Here's some pics...

aluminium bits prior to welding & painting

aluminium bits prior to welding & painting

battery holder

gps mount bracket just cut out

mounted on yak front view

mounted on yak front view

transducer & cable setup

rear view of sounder/gps

[Babylon]

Just trawling through DIY and came across your post i must say
a nice neat and professional looking job there 2rsea very impressed
i like the gps with the sounder.Cheers Jim

[bilby]

Nice install, i have heard of problems with interferance by putting your gps near the sounder, last year when i did a round of the ABT i kept losing sattelite reception, Garmin gps 72 - Eagle cuta 168. I put this down to the fact that Nelson is a pretty isolated place, when i got home i read about a bloke who had interferance issues and i moved my gps and never had the problem again ?? don't know if this was the cause at Nelson but i haven't done it since, i just kep my gps in the side pocket of the PA.
Nice job though, very neat and tidy.
Bilby.