Anyone have a good idea on mounting a regular transducer to your trolling motor without buying the adapter kit? 

Looks like it has one "special" plastic piece and a big hose clamp and some zip ties.

Hey, you are from Radar O'Riley's home town, LOL.

The most durable mount I have seen in person and advertized is the Transducer Shield and Saver.

If you are wanting a cheaper mounting system than the fragile factory mount, just drill a 1/4" hole in you motor skeg, use a stainless steel bolt with stainless locking nut, and a spacer (regular steel is cheaper but will rust) and bolt the transducer to the skeg. As long as the bottom of it is level with the water surface it will be fine.

An alternative if it is new, unused and unopened, is to EXCHANGE it for the proper trolling motor transducer which cost nothing but the return shipping.

No matter what you do, you may need zip ties or tape for the cable to shaft mounting. A roll of plastic tape is quite cheap. You could just let the cable be loose and take a chance of damaging it-it cost nothing to do nothing, but may end up being costly.

"That is all I have to say about that" ---- Forrest Gump

Twice I've tried the go the cheap way out and mount a skimmer transducer on a trolling motor, both times it eventually go broken off.  One just broke the mounting tab off and I reused it as a shoot thru the hull.  The other got up into the TM blade and it cut the cable.  It was useless after that.  My standard practice now is to just go ahead and buy a puck transducer, I'm yet to break one of those off, may do it next trip but I've put them through some pretty ruff stuff and so far, so good.

LOL, yeah I've lived here for 4 yrs, never ran into the guy.

Thanks for the ideas!