Thanks, I need to abandon all the old wire and run new. I am not a fan of the wire connected together to go to different loads the way they are and will probably add a small terminal forward on the boat from the breaker so the wires will still go to the loads but from a terminal instead of wires joined together.
Get the little don casey book on "sailboat electrics" if you don't already have it.
I really enjoyed the wiring part of the project. I ran the wires forward along that little lip along the bottom of the overhead line (mine is solid molded fiberglass, i guess yours is too?). That project had my climbing into and pocking my way around every little nook and crannie on the boat.
Let me point out a couple of things that surprised me, a couple of mistakes I made, and things i would do different: all these are regarding the 12 volt system:
1. all the ground (neg) wires run to a bus and connect there. then the buss is connected to the negative post of the battery by a cable. likewise the positive/ red cable from the battery connects to one side of the little oday fuse/switch plate under the gangway, then the positive wires take off from there. If you draw that out on paper you will see what i mean.
a. i found that my mast wire and my pulpit bow light ran off the switchplate to port, and the cabin lights and the stern light ran off the switch plate to starboard. the mast wires and the bow light is imbeded into the liner, and will have to be abandoned and new wire run along the edge of the cabin liner. you may meet a block at your bulkheads, i was able to get by mine as i had not completed there tabbing in yet. the wire pull came in very hand there.
2. all components are connected in parallel, not series. except the last one on the circuit, which is connected in series (which is really parallel since it is the last)
3. then all the negative run back to the bus, of course.
4. Don't bother to try to take the wire out of your pulpit and rear rail unless you are sure you have too i.e. the wire is definately broken somewhere in there, it is a bitch.
Stuff i found very helpful:
1 The don casey book.
2 multimeter to check ohms and one of those wire pullers.
3 ratchet crimper and ratchet striper....I got them online, let me see if i can find the web site, : heck i can't, but i am pretty sure i did it on amazon, very good investment,,,beats the living hell outa the pocket knife and crimper method. and you want the best connection possible. It took me a few times to figure out the crimper, but now i make a perfect connection (almost) every time!
The cheapest boat cable/wire and fasteners i could find, at the time, were at:
http://shop.genuinedealz.com/Marine Grade Wire/
I used 16 guage cuz it is cheaper, Even though the voltage drop was a little close, i knew i would not be running all loads on the circuit at once, and i knew that i would slowely be swapping over to LED. I didn't go with LED initially because it was a heck of a lot more since i was replacing all fixtures.
Mistakes, I put liquid tape into my connectors after crimping them. but it makes them not work as the liquid leaches into the wire and insulates them I from each other. I had to redo those connections. I used heat shrink connectors also. Another mistake i made was to think i had to use something called "three way heat shrink butt splice" to wire my parallel circuits. dont, they are expensive at over a buck a peice and the little connector in the middle is a source of "non-conductivity" instead use "crimp wire joints", and go with oversize of maybe 112 to 14 g since you are joinning three wires. you can get about 10 for the price of one three way.
i.e. NOT:
http://shop.genuinedealz.com/Items/...eat Shrink Butt Splice 16-14 AWG - Blue - 2pk
but use:
http://shop.genuinedealz.com/Items/... Joint 25pk {MIN: 2@#18 awg}{MAX: 2@#16 awg }
whew, my fingers are tired!!
