Continuing with the ongoing sage of our new N28-2, another issues has come to light. Fortunately, I know exactly what to do about this one. When we did the sea trial of the boat, there were a couple of relatively minor electrical issues. One, some of the panel switches were loose and did not work. Second, it was obvious a couple of the switches were actually broken. These are the original plastic toggle switches that came with the boat, as has been determined by viewing a few pictures of the electrical panel I have been able to find on the net. Anyway, yesterday, I unscrewed the panel from the bulkhead, and gently pulled it out. What I saw was quite odd. All but about two or three of the 12 switches were broken, with the back case pulled from the front mounting, and some of the front mounts were broken. There were four that had at least one wire broken off of the back of the switch. These breaks were on the load side of the switch, so at least there were not any live wires floating around behind the panel. Even before I had discovered all of the damaged switches, I had decided that I was going to replace all of the switches with metal toggle switches with rubber covers. So having to replace the broken switches were already in the plans. What alarmed me was the way the panel is fused. There is the one 20amp push button circuit breaker that feeds all twelve switches. That means that any one switch and associated wiring could carry the full 20 amps of current in the event of a short. Now pretty much all of the wiring going into the panel was 16ga at best with a number being only 18ga. Needless to say, this issue will be rectified during the panel rebuild. I am going to add panel mount fuse holders for each toggle switch, with the appropriately sized fuse for the wiring attached to each switch. That way, I do not have to worry about a small wire carrying way too much current and causing an electrical fire. The rest of the wiring in the panel besides being messy, appears to be in good condition. Anyway, I figured you guys might be interested in the panel condition and planned rebuild.
Mitch
Mitch