I have a Minnkota Endura 50 and I need to splice the black and red wire leads coming from the motor and run them to a 12v battery (about 15 feet of total wire length).  The trolling motor will be the only thing hooked up to the battery.  Questions:

1.  What gauge wire would be recommneded here?  I've heard 6ga, but that's hard to find.  Can I get away with 8 or 10ga?

2.  Should I put a breaker in somewhere near the battery?  If so, how many amps?

3.  Is there anything else I should be considering before I wire this thing?

Thanks guys

For that length and that big of a motor running on 12 volts, you really need to go with #6 fine strand wire, absolutely no smaller than #8.  You can order the cable from Cabela's if you can't find it locally.

I would install a 50 amp breaker on the battery, you can probably order that from Cabela's also.  All connections should be done with heavy guage crimp connectors and solderd after crimping to ensure good connection.

You may have luck finding welding cable.  That is what I used when building my system.  In MD we have a place called Grainger that sells it by the foot.  They may have a web site.

Good Luck,

TD

First of all .. what size wire comes off the trolling motor? For the footage you should not have much voltage drop from the battery. I would bump the wire up 1 size. You may also want to think about running a pull string along with the wire if you decide to change to a 24 volt system someday.

Way2Slow hit the nail on the head.  I agree completely with his recommendations.

Hey, If you ever have trouble finding wiring, your local car audio shops usually stock all the wiring/ distribution blocks/ fuses etc. you can dream of........... and on the plus side, sometimes you can even add a little "Bling" 8-) to your boat!