Barking Sands
Guru
- Joined
- Dec 24, 2019
- Messages
- 888
- Location
- United States
- Vessel Name
- M/V Intrigue
- Vessel Make
- 1985 Tung Hwa Senator
Doing this for a friend of mine. His upper panel was half working. Several wires pulled out. Several additions doing more harm than good etc. I actually fixed all the issues prior to removing the panel because we wanted to be sure the old gauges would actually work or if he was going to have to buy some new gauges. So the first thing was to correct any obvious issues, which was done and we were happy to see all gauges worked fine. Then it was decided to pull the panel and rewire and put in new switches etc. Also to pull the old cracked coating off the aluminum and do something for that. Here are a few pics showing the work. I generally use truck bed liner to coat anything that just needs to be wear resistant these days. It works great and is easy to touch up. Ill need to reinstall this next week and clean up some of the junk wire behind his panel. Funny...the majority of the original connections and wires were good. Only where people have been is the wiring unserviceable. New switches, new wires on 90% of the wire. On some I reused the existing color coded/striped signal wire after cutting off the terminal and stripping and inspecting the wire. It was in surprisingly good shape so to retain the color codes I kept those in place with new terminals. All done to the standard of the original wiring. About 5 hours labor including removal from the boat. Add another hour to install and test. I also added a nice USB charger with integral voltage gauge. Hope he likes that. He was complaining he didnt have a place to charge his phone when we were on my little Senator so I figured I would get one for him. Gauges still need an external cleaning.
