Old Charts and Electronics?

Cleaning out the lower helm station and have a couple pounds of old charts and books. Fun to flip through, but they are pretty old. East coast charts from Norfolk to Florida and then a Bahamas chart book from maybe the mid 90's? And a couple bay chart books from the 80's. . .

Is there any reason to hold onto them? Or are they prime to be rat nest material

Same goes for the electronics. Not much, but there is an old IC-M100 that works I guess (I can radio check to channel 28). Is it something I should bank on replacing or use it till breaks?

There is an LDX-600 depth sounder. It turns on. . .I plugged a disconnected 4 prong plug into it and still doesn't read depth. . .is this something worth trying to figure out and fix?

thanks!

I don't see any reason to keep the old charts. However, I can never. Bring myself to throw away old charts. I've got a ton of them.

They likely will end up as Christmas gift wrap some year.

Keep them, at least some of them that are close to home areas, if for nothing other than interest sake.
I had some old charts and wish I'd kept more of them as it was interesting comparing the new to the old. The new, oddly enough, ignores area that the old covered well. I expect due to shipping/commercial use pattern changes that those areas are no longer used so of less importance.

Of course the new charts reflect current markers and the odd new rock in our area.

I'm not suggesting that the new are inadequate, just seems that the detail in some areas has been reduced to some degree.

If the old radio is the only one aboard do not wait to replace it or at least second it. I've had my vhf fail without warning. NOte though that both failures were on 20-25 year old units used as secondaries.. If it is a second radio then wait.
I keep my older radio as the secondary unit so I can monitor another channel constantly or converse with another boat without losing the main radio to the chatter. The last failure was the antenna but regardless if I didn't have a replacement I would have had no radio in an area it would have been difficult to get a new one quickly.. New antenna brought it back to life.

Replace the sounder if it does not work. Repairing these thing is usually fruitless unless they are darned expensive and fairly recent. If it's just the T>ducer then maybe get a new T.D., other wise just get a replacement.

One of my favorite boat projects ever, was when we redid our dinette table. Instead of removing the old formica/linoleum material, we simply painted over it with black, printed a large local chart in grayscale, and covered it with a piece of lexan.

It ended up being a FANTASTIC addition to the boat. Aside from (in our opinion) looking nice, and being nautical, it was very useful. We often sit around the table discussing past and future trips, and would have a very handy reference. Very often a conversation would be along the lines of "we were here (pointing), and this happened. Then we went over to here (move the wine glass and point again) and met so-and-so" and so forth. Of course we could do the same with a chartbook, but this was way more convenient.




I will do it again in our next boat, but instead of the lexan, I would rather put a coat of clear epoxy over the top to finish. The plastic scratched too easy, and any spills would just go underneath and stain the chart (we have 'the great red sea' in the north corner thanks to my sister spilling her wine).

I think this might be a great way to re-purpose old charts.

I kind of like the wrapping paper idea! These are books though, so not sure how well it would repurpose for a neat table top. The upper helm has much newer electronics that do work. The lower is debatable in its usefulness ��

I have found a bunch of old photos and an album of a previous owner. One is a family reunion album from 20 years ago. No money to be found, id like to track the guy down and see if he wants it back

We used our old charts as wallpaper in the forward head- looks great!

You're in Norfolk. There could be any number of boating schools or Annapolis that could use the charts for their navigation courses...