Re: Help with Minn Kota PowerDrive (wiring)
Yes -- but it won't be pretty. Are you sure the problem is in the motor and not with the foot control? A new foot control for a PD is about $75. Hardly worth the effort of rigging up some gosh awful looking affair. Old trolling motors used what were called speed coils (in electrical terms they were wire wound resistors) sort of like those used to control the heater and A/C fan in cars -- but bigger. They used a switch to select which resistor or combination of resistors that dropped the voltage to the motor to correspond to the speed selected. You could also use a large rheostat type of control but it has to be a large one capable of handling the high current your motor draws. Remember, that setup gets rid of excess voltage so the motor draws the same amount of current on slow speed as it does wide open. Therefore the resistors need to be very high wattage. You really don't want to do either of those techniques because you would have a fair amount of money in parts just because of the current capacity involved.
