Just when you thought it was safe...
Looks like I'm going to have to build two new electrical panels.
Last year, I pretty much re-wired the boat from scratch and built a new house panel. But I didn't mess around much with the wiring attached to the atomic 4 - hey, it was working. Sort of. There are a few inadequacies there still. But the cockpit instrument panel suffers from the same big problem that the old house panel did. The back is exposed in the lazarette, with all of the wires hanging out in a big rats nest. While changing out the muffler, I did in fact yank a couple of wires without noticing, and got a big puff of smoke from a shorted wire. (Hmm... need another fuse in there...) Also, the cockpit instruments have proliferated outside of the panel, through a series of extra holes drilled in the liner. Finally, there is the location, down between the helmsman's ankles and behind the shift lever. Not very useful.
So that's one.
I'm also going to have to build a new mains panel to safely contain main busses and main breakers for house, engine, (planned) windlass, and (planned) solar controller. But I need to do more research on a couple of those items.
Today I'm procrastinating at work and thinking of that cockpit panel.
One possibility is just to build an enclosure for the back of the panel down in the lazarette, and leave it mostly as is. Another might be to combine it with the navigation instrument panel that I made last year, up on the cabin bulkhead.
Everything except the choke cable could possibly move up there. There may be enough slack in the wiring harness - several loops are zip-tied in it. And that would eliminate the big cable going to the auto-tiller socket. So I'm playing around with layouts, while doing some tedious measurements in the lab that have lots of equilibration time.
I could try to salvage what I did last year and add on to it:
Or start over and make a whole new panel. The back-wiring would be pretty tight, but I think it could all squeeze into the back of the galley cabinet that's behind there, with a shield panel to protect the wiring from cabinet contents.
The only real drawback I see to this, other than reducing useful volume in the cabinet, is the instruments may be a bit more exposed to the weather. (Until the (future) dodger comes along.) Maybe I could build a plexiglass cover over the engine section - at the same height as the raymarine instruments? And a larger cover for the whole panel. Then I could either patch the holes down at the old location, or put something like a glove box down there.
Thoughts? Or is there some good reason that the instruments were installed between your ankles down there?
Looks like I'm going to have to build two new electrical panels.
Last year, I pretty much re-wired the boat from scratch and built a new house panel. But I didn't mess around much with the wiring attached to the atomic 4 - hey, it was working. Sort of. There are a few inadequacies there still. But the cockpit instrument panel suffers from the same big problem that the old house panel did. The back is exposed in the lazarette, with all of the wires hanging out in a big rats nest. While changing out the muffler, I did in fact yank a couple of wires without noticing, and got a big puff of smoke from a shorted wire. (Hmm... need another fuse in there...) Also, the cockpit instruments have proliferated outside of the panel, through a series of extra holes drilled in the liner. Finally, there is the location, down between the helmsman's ankles and behind the shift lever. Not very useful.
So that's one.
I'm also going to have to build a new mains panel to safely contain main busses and main breakers for house, engine, (planned) windlass, and (planned) solar controller. But I need to do more research on a couple of those items.
Today I'm procrastinating at work and thinking of that cockpit panel.
One possibility is just to build an enclosure for the back of the panel down in the lazarette, and leave it mostly as is. Another might be to combine it with the navigation instrument panel that I made last year, up on the cabin bulkhead.
Everything except the choke cable could possibly move up there. There may be enough slack in the wiring harness - several loops are zip-tied in it. And that would eliminate the big cable going to the auto-tiller socket. So I'm playing around with layouts, while doing some tedious measurements in the lab that have lots of equilibration time.
I could try to salvage what I did last year and add on to it:
Or start over and make a whole new panel. The back-wiring would be pretty tight, but I think it could all squeeze into the back of the galley cabinet that's behind there, with a shield panel to protect the wiring from cabinet contents.
The only real drawback I see to this, other than reducing useful volume in the cabinet, is the instruments may be a bit more exposed to the weather. (Until the (future) dodger comes along.) Maybe I could build a plexiglass cover over the engine section - at the same height as the raymarine instruments? And a larger cover for the whole panel. Then I could either patch the holes down at the old location, or put something like a glove box down there.
Thoughts? Or is there some good reason that the instruments were installed between your ankles down there?
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