Commercial Electric Fishing Reel
One of Lindsay’s favorite things to do is fish. We can only do this five or six months of the year but, she really enjoys this. We are lucky enough to have a farm pond about a mile from our house that is full of fish. She has caught catfish, bass, bullhead, and perch.
Lindsay currently has an Elec-tra Mate 450PTH mounted to a Penn 450 fishing reel . The Elect-tra Mate cost about $350.00 and the Penn reel about $90.00, but it was well worth it. We made our own switch to save money. we hook it up to a 12 volt battery. She can activate the switch that we made better than the one that we could have gotten with the reel. We special ordered the electrical cable and switch cable at a 6′ length with no ends. We then finished the electrical cable with battery terminal ends to hook up to our battery. The switch cable is wired to the switch we made. This switch is made from a car horn that we have installed inside a small photo album. We drilled two holes in the photo album for the switch to mount to. The car horn sets inside the photo album. We decorated the photo album with purple duct tape and some stickers to make it look neat. All Lindsay has to do is touch the top of the photo album to activate the switch. It will stay activated until she lets off. The reason for using the photo album is Lindsay couldn’t activate the toggle switch that you can get with the reel, and the photo album is a lot bigger area for her to touch. You can adjust the travel in the horn switch or add some weight to the album cover to make it activate with less pressure or force. This switch can be used with your hands, feet, chin, elbow, or just about any part of your body.
We use 1/2 x 1/2″ swivel clamps and a 4′ x 1/2″ aluminum rod that slides through her wheelchair trey holder tubing. The trey holder tubing connects to her arm rest. We slide 1 – 1/2″ x 1/2″ swivel clamp on each end of the 4′ rod. We then slide another 1′ long aluminum rod through the 2nd hole of the swivel clamp. We have 2 - 5/16″ holes drilled through the rod that we bolt the 2″ x 1′ piece of plastic pipe to. We slide the fishing pole butt end (rod handle) into the plastic pipe that is located at the back of her chair. We then have her switch located just in the front of her arm rest. It is bolted to a 1/2′ x 1′ piece of aluminum rod that slides through the other swivel clamp towards the front of her chair. This holds her switch in position and with the excess aluminum rod sticking out of the clamp, we set the rod tip on. We then add another clamp on the excess aluminum 1/2″ rod. The clamp keeps the rod tip from being pulled off by a fish.
