Retired from newspapers and television, currently sailing Thelonious II, a 1984 Ericson 381.
See also "A Novice's Guide to Panel Reorganization," Parts 1 and 2 here.
This project started with a sigh. The little I know about yacht distribution panels is more than I wish I knew, and a glance suggested hours of tedium ahead. The panel was crammed, every wire hard against the other as if vacuum-packed and further compressed by the weight of its own suspension. No way to work on it without a crowbar.
See any circuit breakers in this photo? There are 15 of them under there somewhere.
Several circuit breakers didn't work, or worked only sometimes. The panel itself pulled straight out, and it took a hard pull against the battery cables and the maze of strained connectors. Most of the breakers were hidden from sight, much less access. On top of that, a dozen grounds were thrown like a blanket, because Ericson had mounted the negative bus bar on the same face (bottom left corner in photo above). All wires were nameless and each seemed to flee into darkness to escape identification.
I didn't feel singled out, because such a panel, many times added to, is standard on every boat manufactured before the explosion of 12v gear we take for necessities today. I sighed because I had been here before, on the former boat, and knew what I was in for and how much it would cost to have somebody else do it. What I had forgotten was that, once committed, sprucing up a messy panel is neither difficult nor expensive, and the forest is more daunting than the trees.
DC panels are much improved, seems to me, if they swing down rather than just float free. I put two hardware store brass hinges on the bottom of the Ericson plastic face so it could open almost 180 degrees. That alone was a vast improvement. Next, to clean out the old wiring. Nobody ever does, when installing new gear. But after 30-plus years every passageway or conduit was literally full and there wasn't any choice but to hack away and start fresh. Sounds simple enough. But a wire from the cockpit on an E38 travels overhead the engine, dives for the battery compartment, exits that into the nav seat locker, penetrates the AC panel, rises into the DC panel, and may need to pass through more bulkheads from there. Access is not very good. Just cutting cable ties and yanking wires took a full day.
The next step was to separate the grounds from the overcrowded plate. I screwed a big Blue Seas bus bar to the after side of the panel opening and moved them all to that. Then I found that I could use the old bus for the 15 indicator light grounds, which had previously contributed to the overall impenetrability.
This era of Ericsons used heavy, metal-toggle circuit breakers no longer manufactured by AMF/Wood. There's room for 15. I recognized them from aircraft I used to fly and their secure feel contributed to the appeal of saving the original panel. Exact replacements are available at $40 through Custom Marine Services in Murrells Inlet, S.C. Mickey Spillane used to live there ("I, the Jury"; they don't make book titles like that no more). http://cmsquick.com/prod_24_W1.html
Things were looking neater already.
The goal wasn't perfection, I just wanted to renew wire terminations, clean everything up, and create a panel that could be worked on in future without six aspirin and a suicide note. The recommended ring terminals are elegant and fail-safe. But they're also ridiculous in a miniature maze in which connecting one breaker screw may take five tries. So I yielded to reality and now have a mixture of spades and rings. It is much easier to add a second or third instrument to a breaker if the new wire has a spade on it. I also broke my rules about exclusive use of expensive heat-shrink fittings or heat-gun tubing. The original panel had no heat shrink on any connector, and after 32 years showed little corrosion at all. So I left most of the originals as they were.
I did carefully sand and polish all the faces, including the copper bus bars that connect the hot side of the breakers. With everything apart, the little jobs become easy. I bought a dozen bus and circuit breaker screws, so when I dropped one into nowhere I could laugh instead of cry. None of it was time consuming unless expected home for dinner.
I was installing an Evo-100 wheel pilot with P70 control head and a Garmin 74dv chart plotter with a new Airmar transducer, both run from thh binnacle. Also, my old Vesper Watchmate AIS, with its 12v antenna splitter; a new radio (actually my old one, which Bruce generously gave back to me); an old Garmin 192 backup GPS; a new Victron battery monitor; an iPhone charging station and a red night lamp for the chart table. It's a minimal set of instruments with no cross-talk except DSC. The anemometer is Tack-tick (now Raymarine) wireless.
Even so, I managed to do things the hard way by installing an auxiliary bus bar for NMEA wires. I painstakingly D-sub crimped infinitesimally small ring terminals on #26 wire, using a new set of tools for the job. It looked so cool that I used the same method to reconnect the Airmar sonar cable I had to cut (big pin connectors don't fit through binnacle guard tubes). I felt like a bus bar king, if I do say so, after getting my fat half-busted fingers to perform surgery on these fairy-princess electrical parts and only ruining, dropping or accidentally inhaling a dozen of them. But before I had a chance to go to the club bus bar and brag myself up, along came Charlie Saylan to see how I was doing. Charlie is a professional yacht electrician.
I showed him the tiny bus bars with their tiny wires and tiny ring conectors, all neatly installed in their tiny little doll house. He nodded, admiring.
"I probably just would've used a push-in connector," he said. Oh, one of those plastic things where you just stick the wires in and tighten a set screw? Oh, Like on the Evo-100 computer box? Oh, because it is very hard to put ring connectors on tiny wires, and I wouldn't have to buy all those D-sub tools? But Charlie was gone. I think he likes giving me advice when it means taking a break from re-wiring a Hinckley Bermuda 40, which apparently has the most inaccessible DC panel in 20th century yachting.
I'd like to report that all this took two and a half days, but in fact it took about 10 days. But time is tuition, and I now know every DC wire on the boat. If something doesn't light up, I won't go dark, too.
The AC panel? Not for us amateurs. DC is fun, as when Senor Volta appears in a Mexican bar with a car battery around his neck, and all the pretty girls give him a peso so they can hold hands and feel the buzz. AC will hurt you. As Charlie says while disconnecting shore power and tying the cord safely aside, "no death for me today."
This project started with a sigh. The little I know about yacht distribution panels is more than I wish I knew, and a glance suggested hours of tedium ahead. The panel was crammed, every wire hard against the other as if vacuum-packed and further compressed by the weight of its own suspension. No way to work on it without a crowbar.
See any circuit breakers in this photo? There are 15 of them under there somewhere.
Several circuit breakers didn't work, or worked only sometimes. The panel itself pulled straight out, and it took a hard pull against the battery cables and the maze of strained connectors. Most of the breakers were hidden from sight, much less access. On top of that, a dozen grounds were thrown like a blanket, because Ericson had mounted the negative bus bar on the same face (bottom left corner in photo above). All wires were nameless and each seemed to flee into darkness to escape identification.
I didn't feel singled out, because such a panel, many times added to, is standard on every boat manufactured before the explosion of 12v gear we take for necessities today. I sighed because I had been here before, on the former boat, and knew what I was in for and how much it would cost to have somebody else do it. What I had forgotten was that, once committed, sprucing up a messy panel is neither difficult nor expensive, and the forest is more daunting than the trees.
DC panels are much improved, seems to me, if they swing down rather than just float free. I put two hardware store brass hinges on the bottom of the Ericson plastic face so it could open almost 180 degrees. That alone was a vast improvement. Next, to clean out the old wiring. Nobody ever does, when installing new gear. But after 30-plus years every passageway or conduit was literally full and there wasn't any choice but to hack away and start fresh. Sounds simple enough. But a wire from the cockpit on an E38 travels overhead the engine, dives for the battery compartment, exits that into the nav seat locker, penetrates the AC panel, rises into the DC panel, and may need to pass through more bulkheads from there. Access is not very good. Just cutting cable ties and yanking wires took a full day.
The next step was to separate the grounds from the overcrowded plate. I screwed a big Blue Seas bus bar to the after side of the panel opening and moved them all to that. Then I found that I could use the old bus for the 15 indicator light grounds, which had previously contributed to the overall impenetrability.
This era of Ericsons used heavy, metal-toggle circuit breakers no longer manufactured by AMF/Wood. There's room for 15. I recognized them from aircraft I used to fly and their secure feel contributed to the appeal of saving the original panel. Exact replacements are available at $40 through Custom Marine Services in Murrells Inlet, S.C. Mickey Spillane used to live there ("I, the Jury"; they don't make book titles like that no more). http://cmsquick.com/prod_24_W1.html
Things were looking neater already.
The goal wasn't perfection, I just wanted to renew wire terminations, clean everything up, and create a panel that could be worked on in future without six aspirin and a suicide note. The recommended ring terminals are elegant and fail-safe. But they're also ridiculous in a miniature maze in which connecting one breaker screw may take five tries. So I yielded to reality and now have a mixture of spades and rings. It is much easier to add a second or third instrument to a breaker if the new wire has a spade on it. I also broke my rules about exclusive use of expensive heat-shrink fittings or heat-gun tubing. The original panel had no heat shrink on any connector, and after 32 years showed little corrosion at all. So I left most of the originals as they were.
I did carefully sand and polish all the faces, including the copper bus bars that connect the hot side of the breakers. With everything apart, the little jobs become easy. I bought a dozen bus and circuit breaker screws, so when I dropped one into nowhere I could laugh instead of cry. None of it was time consuming unless expected home for dinner.
I was installing an Evo-100 wheel pilot with P70 control head and a Garmin 74dv chart plotter with a new Airmar transducer, both run from thh binnacle. Also, my old Vesper Watchmate AIS, with its 12v antenna splitter; a new radio (actually my old one, which Bruce generously gave back to me); an old Garmin 192 backup GPS; a new Victron battery monitor; an iPhone charging station and a red night lamp for the chart table. It's a minimal set of instruments with no cross-talk except DSC. The anemometer is Tack-tick (now Raymarine) wireless.
Even so, I managed to do things the hard way by installing an auxiliary bus bar for NMEA wires. I painstakingly D-sub crimped infinitesimally small ring terminals on #26 wire, using a new set of tools for the job. It looked so cool that I used the same method to reconnect the Airmar sonar cable I had to cut (big pin connectors don't fit through binnacle guard tubes). I felt like a bus bar king, if I do say so, after getting my fat half-busted fingers to perform surgery on these fairy-princess electrical parts and only ruining, dropping or accidentally inhaling a dozen of them. But before I had a chance to go to the club bus bar and brag myself up, along came Charlie Saylan to see how I was doing. Charlie is a professional yacht electrician.
I showed him the tiny bus bars with their tiny wires and tiny ring conectors, all neatly installed in their tiny little doll house. He nodded, admiring.
"I probably just would've used a push-in connector," he said. Oh, one of those plastic things where you just stick the wires in and tighten a set screw? Oh, Like on the Evo-100 computer box? Oh, because it is very hard to put ring connectors on tiny wires, and I wouldn't have to buy all those D-sub tools? But Charlie was gone. I think he likes giving me advice when it means taking a break from re-wiring a Hinckley Bermuda 40, which apparently has the most inaccessible DC panel in 20th century yachting.
I'd like to report that all this took two and a half days, but in fact it took about 10 days. But time is tuition, and I now know every DC wire on the boat. If something doesn't light up, I won't go dark, too.
The AC panel? Not for us amateurs. DC is fun, as when Senor Volta appears in a Mexican bar with a car battery around his neck, and all the pretty girls give him a peso so they can hold hands and feel the buzz. AC will hurt you. As Charlie says while disconnecting shore power and tying the cord safely aside, "no death for me today."
