First time I saw one of the old JohnnyRude trolling motors from 1977 I was a bit confused. The dang shaft wasn’t straight and the shaft didn’t attach to the mid-section of the motor head. It looked goofy to me.
Then around 1980 we bought a 16-foot MonArk V-16 and the trolling motor that came on it – primarily because Marine Associates of Bellflower only sold Johnson – was a Johnson like the ‘Rude you see in the picture. The thing was a 24-volt motor and I think it had 36 or maybe 42 pounds of thrust, nearly twice as much as the ’76 Shakespeare we had on the Sea Nymph.
The first time out, it I took a bit of getting used to. First off, the pedal was backwards of what the Shakespeare was. In other words, push down on the front of the Shakespeare, the motor would go left. Push on the rear, it’d go right. After a day of fishing, my brain finally gave up and let my foot do the work. Within a couple of trips, I could never operate that backwards Shakespeare again.
After using the motor for a while, though, I began to really appreciate the design features in the JohnRude. They were the first trolling motor company to angle the back of the pedal to help overcome torque – it was really noticeable. The other cool thing was – just like they said in the ad – the head didn’t hang up in the weeds as much as the other trolling motors because the shaft met the motor at the front.
The other thing that was really noticeable, and I didn’t understand this until physics in college, was the angle in which the motor head was placed at actually was the main reason the torque of the motor was so little. I mean you could have this thing on a setting of 10 and it turned as easily as if it were set on two.
Not sure why other trolling motor companies didn’t pick up on the design features and incorporate them into their motors, except for maybe patent reasons. Now that OMC/Bombardier is no longer producing trolling motors (or big motors for that matter) it makes you wonder if any of the trolling motor manufacturers would look back at this design feature.
Another aspect of that motor was we never had a cable break on it and it saw the water 52 weekends a year minimum. My buds that had MercThrusters (aka the Coffee Grinder), MinnKotas and Motor-Guides always had to carry a spare cable with them. Not with the JohnRude. At least that was my experience, yours results may have been different.
My experience was very, very different. I burnt up not one, but two of those things in the same calendar year. The cable driven articulation (lays the motor down when you pull it up) was absolutely worthless. It was designed to jump the key out of its socket if you ran that thing into a log or something. After a time or two, it rounded the aluminum, and it would never stay in place again. Put it on high and hit the button, and the motor would kick up. The fix — replace the articulation cable AND that arm of the bracket. $140 bucks in mid-nineties dollars. As far as I’m concerned it was the worst trolling motor I’ve ever owned. A list that includes Shakespeare (mine steered in the right direction), Rebel, Ram, MG, MK, Silvertroll and that horrid evinrude. The only TM I ever used that steered backwards was a Byrd.
Rich, you and I have had this conversation a few times over the years. I think I may have had a later model, ours being from 1980/81. Ours did none of the things you state above, and if it did, I’d have the same opinion for sure. Ours ran solid from the day we bought it until the day it was sold in 1984 when we bought our first Champion. We never had a problem with it at all and none of the guys I knew had problems with theirs. Now the Merc Thruster, on the other hand, that thing was a POS. 🙂