Looking at these boards to troll smaller lakes, anyone use them, good, bad, etc. also what size trolling rod is best, thinking 8’6”. Have Garcia 5500 was going to put on braided line of some sort, and a barrel swivel with Fluor carbon line. Any advice welcome. 1 lake has pike, musky, walleye. Raystown has strippers.

May wanna use a reel with a little more line capacity for pulling plainer boards.like the 6500 or maybe 7000 if you have any. If not just use what you have and hope I good size striper don't take a big run

Plan on buying Okuma line counters if this works out.

We used Sidewinder planer boards last year fishing Saginaw bay and Lake St. Clair for walleyes and they worked fine. Don't cost cost as much as the other planers. One thing we did was add different releases that clamp the line and you can adjust for the amount of pull it takes to release the line. I'll use them again this year when i go up there.

Sidewinder Boards

I use the offshore boards. They are good for the money. Run them on line counter reels. Daiwa 27 accudepth. 8 ft 6 rods. Works well.

Don't laugh to hard butImade these last summer. I have used them severstimes on erie this year. No complaints here other then I wished I had a couple more. The clamps are from harbor freight.
I did drill and insert a 1/8 dowel pin through the clamp pads. I wrap each pad one turn behind the pin.
Since I took the pic I added a 4 inch long lead weight to the bottom towards the front. The weights are a 1/2 inch diameter split down the middle.

I am all about doing it on the cheap. Probably less the 5$ per board.

All of these came from the boards above

I own and use the offshore boards, and have fished the Church boards, Church stern planers, and Big Jon mini boards. Haven't tried Ack's yet, but they look like they'd work, other than I am not sure you'd be able to run braid line with his clips.
If you are set on using braid, off shore has a snapper clip that will work, but I still tend to wrap the line around it especially at faster trolling speeds.
Also, you can set the boards up for the front clip to release so you are not fighting the board (when a big fish pulls it under, the churches tend to do this alot), but just the fish. Go to Offshores website, or check out Mark Romanack and precision trolling, tons of information there. As far as your reels, if you're on a budget and are stuck with your Garcia's for a while, Berkley has a clamp on line counter. Otherwise you can measure the distance of line out on each pass on your reel, knowing that six passes is so many feet back. Precision trolling has an app for your phone, or if you can find them, a hard copy precision trolling book. This shows dive curves for the lures you want to run.

Good luck