Hey I am new here but I really hope someone can help me out..

I just got a 12' jon boat and it came with the Minn Kota All Terrain bow mount foot trolling motor.  At first inspection everything seemed okay, If I drop it over the front while on the trailer it moves nice and easy 360 degrees with the pedal.  However..I just put it in the water this weekend to give to boat a little test run since I just got it and was too excited for warm weather haha and it was terrible..the motor would move from left to right and in reverse..that was it. I could not get it to move me forward, it was like someone was underwater holding the shaft when trying to put it in the forward position.  Then the other strange thing to me was I could pull it up out of the water and it would fall facing forward and as soon as I lowered it back into the water without touching the pedal the shaft would rotate back to the right or left and still not let me move it forward.

Anyone ever had a problem like this?  I hope it's not a very hard fix as it is my only motor at this point in time and we are supposed to have a nice weekend coming up haha.

 

Oh PS- If i tried really hard pushing the pedal all the way down trying to rotate the motor in the water sometimes the indicator dial would make popping noises and then pop up off the gear inside.

I just don't know what to do because like I said it moves so smoothly with no resistance out of the water..any help will be greatly appreciated.

First off, Hello and Welcome to Bass Resource.

Sorry to hear about your trolling motor - sounds like it's pretty jacked up.

Perhaps you should consider taking it to a Minn Kota Authorized Service Center ~

You can check for the nearest location here . . .

http://www.minnkotamotors.com/Authorized-Service-Providers/

Good Luck

A-Jay

Yea that will be my last resort since the closest one on that list is an hour away from me and I just bought the boat so I won't hear the end of it from my fiance if I have to go spend more money on a company fixing the motor..hope someone else has had a similar problem and found a fix themselves.  Thank you for the quick response though.

My advice is take the TM off the boat and take it to a repairman keeping in mind that a new one will probably cost about $400.00 BTW, the All Terrain is the same as the Edge. There is quite a bit going on under the hood of these devices.

Can't help you with the fiancé but even small simple boats are still boats and a boat is a code word for expensive. Old Indian saying "Boats costs much Wampum"

Well I'm always the type to tinker with things and try to fix everything so yesterday I took the housing off the top and started looking around and noticed the cable was pretty loose, went to tighten down the screw and noticed it was as tight as it would go so I started looking for a new problem and noticed the bracket holding the wires had brokeno off the plastic housing. So grabbed some different screws and made a new housing in the same place and then tightened the cable once more and bam that's fixed. So the pedal feels 10x more responsive then before and I'm really hoping that's all it was. Going to put her in the water this Saturday and then will know for sure..

Wish me luck and thanks for the advice.