Jack Plate

[rjn cajun]

I have a long shaft 8hp motor on my 10ft boat with a 15" transom. I don`t want to buy a short shaft I love the motor and it runs great. Can I buy a jack plate for such a small boat and motor? I can`t get on plane at all and the nose is way up in the air. I`m not even close to the max weight for my boat. Just wanted to know your opinons and if any of you have had any experience with them on small boats. Thanks guy`s.

[clarkbre]

A jack plate or motor riser would be perfect for that application. I have a 16’ Lund that had the same thing when I bought it. The motor was a longshaft on a 15” transom.

For my application, I had an aluminum riser built. I determined the motor needed to come up 6” total for the cavitation plate to be level with the bottom of the boat. Here’s what I did:

The transom was 1.5” thick. I used (4) 1.5”x1.5”x12” aluminum tubing stacked to get a total rise of 6”. So that piece was 1.5”x12”x6”. I welded the tubing together for strength. Then, I used (2) 12”x12”x1/8” aluminum plate and welded it to the tubing. Doing so made 6” tabs to straddle the front and back of the transom. I used (4) 3/8” bolts to bolt the riser to the boat and then clamped the motor onto the riser.

Overall it works perfect and really improved the performance of the boat. I notice it most on the hole shot, it gets up to speed much faster and the motor works a lot less due to reduced drag.

I hope all that made sense. I’ll try to take a pic of what I had built.

[rjn cajun]

Thanks for all the help clarkbre. It`s already being fabricated at the welding shop. Can`t wait to get it back and try it out.