%$&#!! Windlass foot switch meets previous owner's creative wiring

[Bob Bradley]

Well, I didn't have the patience to wait for the new switches that I ordered online, so I stopped by Boaters World, and bought one more "el garbo" model so I could get my boating fix for the weekend. I replaced the "up" switch, and found that the one that failed had the bottom literally drop out of it. BTW, it was a Sierra POS switch, not a Seadog as originally posted. The bottom is just pressed into the top with no apparent bonding of the plastic, so it simply fell apart after about a half dozen uses.

So, I did the quick replacement, hit the button and viola! Nothing. Nada. She no push. OK, got out the tester, checked for juice. Nope. No 12v to the switch. Crawled into the anchor locker and checked the fuses at the solenoids, and they were fine. Checked the main + lead to the windlass, and it was colder than a witch's pit. Climbed into the engine room, traced the cables back to the panels, opened the 12v electrical panel, and observed the following:

The red + windlass cable was not hooked up to the windlass 100amp fuse, but rather to the adjacent spare 100amp fuse, which was of course, blown. Now I'm getting worried. Just how did I manage to blow a 100amp fuse? Upon closer inspection, I see that not only is the cable bent and stretched to the wrong fuse (the correct one, which would be a nice straight run for the cable is clearly marked "windlass"), but the fuse isn't even mounted correctly in the panel.

There are a half dozen of so identical fuses. Each is mounted on a pair of 5/16" studs, and each has 2 washers on each stud, serving as spacers behind the fuses. All but one. The blown fuse, with the stretched cable, had 2 washers behind it on the top stud, and 2 washers in front of it on the lower stud. This caused the fuse to sit in an awkward bent position, and have a poor contact at the lower end. I'm presuming that resistance from the poor contact is responsible for the fuse being blown.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom how anyone could install anything as poorly as this, and think "ok, I'm done now". It turned my 5 minute job into a 2 hour job. It's enough to make you scream.

[jim rosenthal]

I am glad you were able to solve the problem. We should have a section where photos of previous installations like this such as this can be posted for our entertainment and edification. My boat too had an unbelievable number of wiring items of exactly this kind, which was maddening. It is astonishing that it didn't incinerate itself before I began pulling all the wiring out.

[J's Dream]

I am glad you were able to solve the problem. We should have a section where photos of previous installations like this such as this can be posted for our entertainment and edification. My boat too had an unbelievable number of wiring items of exactly this kind, which was maddening. It is astonishing that it didn't incinerate itself before I began pulling all the wiring out.

Jim,

Maybe BLUE NOTE's previous owner also was the previous owner of my SEA-YA. In the past few months of owning her, I have pulled out at least 200 pounds of wire...some hot, some just cut and stuffed in holes, and today some loose to 240V HOT! We should photograph this and post "What NOT to do"!

Jason

[Genesis]

Oh man......

If you want to push my hot buttons, wiring disasters are one of the BIG ones. That gets me VERY annoyed, and is one of the reasons I will reject a boat out of hand.

Its simply too much work to trace that stuff down and fix it. I had a SMALL situation like this with Gigabite when I bought her - a previous owner thought it would be cute to redo the alarms, but did a half-azz job and everything rang on the fire bell. The wire was all there, but much of it was run improperly, shorted, or just plain wrong.

I ripped it ALL out and rewired the entire panel. There ain't no way I want a fire alarm going off for anything BUT a fire!

[Jaxfishgyd]

When we bought our boat, I repaired over 40 splices where previous owners had used either wire nuts or (my favorite) just twisted the wires together and "sealed" using electical tape.
Am sure there are still others that I have still yet to find......
But hey..... My windlass switch's still work

[MikeP]

Yeah - I had some of that on Brigadoon but it was curiously erratic. Most aftermarket stuff was wired very well - just like Hatt did it. However, other items were the "rat's nest" wiring method. I can't figure out why this difference occurred. I'm told that as the previous owner got into his 80's, he quit doing most of the work on the boat, turning it over to his son. Since the later electronic items seem to be the most offensive, I'm assuming that the son was not quite up to the task - or at least the interest level - of his father, exNavy who spent two years in a WWII Destroyer engine room.

Like others here, I take great pride in proper wiring and enjoy ripping out the bad stuff. I have also found my share of unconnected wiring, and hot wires to nowhere. My favorite - though not particularly unsafe finding- was a 32V cable from a main 10A circuit breaker that went to another separate 10A breaker in a remote box, that went from there to a fuse block with a 10A fuse in it! From there it ran into the engine room and was coiled in a small loop and cut off/electrical taped. Weird!

[REBrueckner]

Surface corrosion in fuse holders can cause fuses to blow without any other reason. To avoid this, once a year I rotate every fuse I can think of in its holder to "scrub" corrosion from fuse and holder. Last time a fuse blew it was for my Webasto heater...just a bit of corrosion...(in the middle of winter of course) ...that's how I learned my lesson.

For high amperage devices, especially starters but also windlasses, only use copper or brass washers NOT stainless steel...they can get too hot.

Corosion block or a similar protectant can likely help forestall such problems especially in moist areas like rope/chain lockers.

When I removed the 220 volt electric stove on my YF and replaced it with propane, for safety I disconnected all 240 v wires right at the electric panel. It turned out they were convenient to reuse to power my engine block heaters (after feeding them from 120 volts) so I can control them from the electric panel rather than engine room.

As others have noted, after 30 years wiring gets mussy as new gagets are added and many original wire runs are fastened in place and can't be extracted. Fortunately my electric panel was near original and properly done.

[Maynard Rupp]

Unity, our 36C had some cute ones also. They always seem to wire their cute stereo with lamp cord or speaker wire. Our boat's previous owner wired the negative wires for everything he added to the green ground bus. Hey, they work don't they. Bah!! Of course he also wrapped all his wiring around the screws instead of using terminal ends. Why not use lamp cord and twist it around the screw if you are using the ground system for a negative 12volts eh?

[Bob Bradley]

In retrospect, I wish I had taken some pictures of the wiring and other bs I've encountered. It's just that when I see it, I get this compulsion to start tearing stuff out, and don't think about grabbing the camera. I'll tell you this, the boat's in a heck of a lot better shape now than when I bought her.

The first season in, I took a circular saw to the gunwales to fix the result of rodholders installed without benefit of caulk or sealing of the endgrain balsa. That was a great feeling - cutting 6 feet up each side, and across the stern 12 months after buying her. I actually did take a couple shots of that mess.

I started on the wiring shortly (no pun intended) after that, removing no less than 100 yds of crap, and often live, wire from the overhead console alone. My cockpit looked like a pterydactyl nest by the time I was done. It's only now I'm finding the more obscure problems like this one.

[jim rosenthal]

I have to say, my Hatteras is from the era where there was no ABYC wiring code. Hatteras wired everything with red 12ga wire and put little labels on at each end, identifying which circuit it was. A lot of that is gone now- when I repowered the boat we used CAT factory harnesses and replaced all of the red stuff- but much of the boat is still wired with the original red wiring. That's good, as they used good quality wire that has held up for 35 years. It's bad, in that the little labels didn't hold up nearly as well and virtually all of them have come off.
At one time, I thought of having Blue Note rewired. Paying for a few small wiring projects that I couldn't do myself cured me of that idea really quickly- I would guess that a comprehensive rewire on Blue Note, which is a relatively simple boat, would be 25-30K. What I have done is to try to work to code when I replace wiring, and use what is recommended in modern wiring guides.
But I recall fairly clearly what I encountered under the flybridge when I first got the boat- radios etc wired to wherever they could find a hot with a VOM, no grounds, and lots of wiring just flapping in the breeze. The shore connects were a joke- it really is amazing the boat didn't burn to the waterline. The most interesting thing was the battery charging circuits- with the original Sentry charger (which may have been state-of-the-art when fitted but by the time I got it was a POS), I could never get the batteries fully charged. I finally figured out why- all the charging returns were running through one little 16gauge wire back to a ground loom. Idiotic. When you look at charging cables, there has to be an equal-size return cable back to the charger for the negative side of the charging circuit. Once I installed that, the Sentry charger promptly and gleefully boiled all the batteries- but at least they were charging. That's when I got a Statpower.
Much of the original wiring is still in there, and most of the original breakers. At that time, Hatteras was one of the few yacht builders that built their own electrical panels in house, and they did a good job. But if you ever see a professional marine electrician wiring a boat (at least the ones I have met), you'll see how it's supposed to be done. My previous boat (a Striker) was rewired by a Coast Guard master electrician from Curtis Bay, and in addition to having the boat rewired, I learned a great deal. For one thing, ring all the circuits back, and remove dead wiring. Keep wires out of the bilge. Don't use wire nuts or tape. Shrinktube everything you can. Get the best crimper you can afford. And (and this works for procedures in medicine too!)- work slowly and make sure you are as comfortable as you can get when you are installing wiring. Work that you do when you are distracted by being pretzeled around something is not as likely to hold up as work you did when you were able to pay careful attention, work slowly and carefully, and do it right the first time.