Caution using Catalina Direct mast wiring harness

[jfrench]

Tonight I debugged a problem in my mast lighting and the problem is worthy of noting here. Last summer I replaced all the mast lights and wiring with new. I very carefully followed the wiring diagram printed in the factory manual using a pre-made wiring harness from Catalina Direct. Whenever I turned on the anchor light however, I also got a soft glow from the deck illumination light.

According to the diagram, the wire colors were:

Green = Ground
Black = Deck Light
White = Steaming Light
Red = Anchor light​

The Cat Direct harness has a 3-wire cable that reaches mid-way up the mast for the Steaming/ Deck light and it had the required colors of wire: Green, Black, and White. I wired those per the diagram.

Joined to that 3-wire, is a 2-wire cable long enough to reach the anchor light at the mast top. It's connection to the 3-wire cable is hidden inside heavy heat-shrink insulation applied at the factory. The wires on it were not Green for ground and Red for anchor light as defined by the factory, but rather black and white. I wired the white to the positive side of the anchor light and assumed the black wire was hooked to green (ground) inside the heat shrink. It is not!

Catalina Direct uses black for negative (ground) in this harness, not for the deck light's positive. Conversely, green is not ground - it's the deck light's positive. One white wire is the positive for the anchor light and the other white is positive for the steaming light. There is no red wire.

I had to trace the harness wires to discover this. Now that the mast is wired correctly, I'll have to rewire the male deck connector so that black goes to the grounded pole in the connector instead of green.

In summary, if you buy the Cat Direct harness, don't blindly follow the factory diagram color coding or attempt to match colors with the boat wiring leading to the female deck connector on your deck.

 

[jfrench]

OK, it gets even crazier. I went out today to move the wires around on the male (mast half) connector so that black goes to ground. When I exposed the wires to the connector, I found that at the connector there was indeed a green, a black, a white, and a red as required by the factory diagram. CD thought enough to put the correct wire colors at the connector end, but felt that they could change 'em up half way up the mast! Rather than run green and red to the anchor light, they ran black and white. Probably, the white is connected to the red tail at the connector (red is supposed to be the + for the anchor light). Had they connected the black to the green tail (the proper color for ground) all would have been well. Instead, it is hooked to the connector lead intended to power the deck light.

Maybe the guy in the warehouse doing the wiring thought that black must connect to black when he made up the harness.

When fatal accidents are investigated, scenarios like this are often found as causes. Someone takes a shortcut, in this case using non-standard 2-wire from a junction to the anchor light, but doesn't take the effort to publish a schematic, or notify others in the user loop. All subsequent work done to the system follows approved procedures, but the resulting product is wrong. In this case, a hot wire gets connected to ground. Catalina Direct's a good resource and they do a lot of good, but sometimes I get the feeling that they're staffed and managed by folks who don't actually do boat maintenance or restoration and appreciate the importance of details.

 

[Chris Patterson]

I think......that just looking at that archaic old web site tells me a lot about the technology side of that operation....

 

[Bilbo]

At some point, when I was checking my mast wiring I found two wires crossed. I think that the harness is original. It makes me wonder......There are some things that should be stronger I think such as I think that the keel hangers should be more substantial & with more bolts. I also think that the lifting hardware could have been better designed. They did upgrade the mast and spreader brackets after a few of the very first ones failed. (Recently, I saw one of those boats for sale locally) That being said, I do think that the standing rigging is pretty substantial compared to other similar boats & we do have to consider the intended purpose of this type of boat.I wonder if they Frank Butler and Catalina Yachts ever expected that these boats would still be sailing after 40+ years.

 

[Brad Woodward]

I found a similar situation on my boat. My engine hour meter quit working so I had to replace the tach/hr meter. CD wanted $600+ for it. Decided a $120 would work just as well. Found someone didn't have long enough wires of the correct color so they used what they had. Long story short got out the old volt meter and found black and red were reversed. As a side note could not figure our how to tell what type of alternator I has in order to set the dip switches. I ended up using the old meter and found my engine idled hot at 800 RPM. So I experimented with the switches until I got the correct idle RPM. If anyone knows how to tell the type of alternator (# of poles) please let me know.

 

[Brad Woodward]

I found a similar situation on my boat. My engine hour meter quit working so I had to replace the tach/hr meter. CD wanted $600+ for it. Decided a $120 would work just as well. Found someone didn't have long enough wires of the correct color so they used what they had. Long story short got out the old volt meter and found black and red were reversed. As a side note could not figure our how to tell what type of alternator I had in order to set the dip switches. I ended up using the old meter and found my engine idled hot at 800 RPM. So I experimented with the switches until I got the correct idle RPM. If anyone knows how to tell the type of alternator (# of poles) please let me know.

 

[ShotgunSlim]

RE: JFrench, I found the same disparity in my wiring harness from CD when I re wired my mast this year. Fortunately, I've had enough bad experiences with wiring to make me extra cautious so I laid out the new harness, wired up the mast plug and hooked up the lights before pulling it through the mast. It took some notes and a bunch of back probing with a 12 volt tester to figure everything out but it was a whole lot easier than trying to do it after pulling the wires through the mast. I would highly recommend doing it this way to anyone who is tackling that job.

 

[jfrench]

<<wired up the mast plug and hooked up the lights before pulling it through the mast>> That's much better way to do it. Thinking back now to when I did the work a year or more ago, I saw all the right wire colors at the bottom end of the harness and took that as a sign that the Cat Direct harness was just like factory. I'll know better next time!