68 Practical Boat Owner t http://www.pbo.co.uk
PRACTICAL
Fed up with an untidy and unmanageable rat’s nest of electrical
wiring, Russell Eden renews his yacht’s bulkhead switch panel
T
he switch panel on board my
Cornish Yawl, Lucy, is located
above the engine at the top
step of the companionway. But
I’d never liked the look the setup since
I first stepped aboard in the shed at
the sales yard three years earlier.
The switch panel, engine control and
battery switch were randomly misaligned,
and there was a voltmeter, a push button
and screw holes for a stern gland greaser
which no longer existed. The untidiness of
it all had always driven me to distraction.
In addition, the wiring I inherited ran from
the fuse panel under the companionway,
though an assortment of drilled holes to a
flat area on the underside of the starboard
berth ceiling. At this point, there was a
random earth and several block
connectors with power and NMEA wires
heading all over the place.
Access to the fuse panel was achieved
by removing it, and with so many wires it
was not only difficult to remove, but it was
easy to drop at least one of the
connections each time you moved it.
It’s always tempting to add new electrics
and electronics to your boat, and Lucy
has had quite a share of that. I have
added an EchoPilot Trio for depth and
speed and a Standard Horizon GX series
AIS VHF, which both required wiring in to
the negative busbar and the switch panel.
Access involved removing bits from the
instrument panel and then fishing, or
groping in the dark.
I realised that all of the wiring behind the
panel needed to be tidied up. It had
become a bit of a rat’s nest, the location of
it making it damned near impossible to
get at in the marina, so to sort out an issue
at sea would be nigh on impossible.
What was clearly needed was something
like the arrangements I’ve seen in newer
boats – a drop down panel to make
access easy, and a tidier wiring system to
make it easy to test and repair under way.
To add spice to all of the jobs I do on
Lucy is the issue of living 250 miles away.
Every job requires extensive thought and
planning, as I need to have all the tools I
could possibly need both at home and
when I’m fitting the parts.
Getting this right every time is quite a
challenge if I’m to keep my eight-hour
round trips to a minimum. Therefore, I
carefully worked out how it would look
using my QCAD software to take away
the guesswork.
Firstly, I needed a panel, and a chunk of
the teak-faced plywood chart table wasElectric surgery
on a Cornish Yawl
ABOUT THE AUTHORthe ideal candidate. That’s not as daft as it
sounds as, in addition to this job, I was
planning to replace the table with a new
oak worktop and use the extra legroom for
a drawer for pots and pans, and a Waeco
20lt drawer fridge.
So I cut out a section 600mm wide
which included the 600mm teak fiddle. It
was perfect. I took it to my local joiner to
have it ‘squared’ on their machines, and
have a 35mm strip cut from the bottom.
This would be the part which screwed fast
to what remained of the original bulkhead
and would carry the new 600mm long
25mm stainless steel piano hinge.
The panel is held closed with a 90°
sprung cam lock by Lowe and Fletcher.
I will need to fit some toggle switches
later, but they will look balanced.
The existing negative busbar was refixed
to the rear bulkhead that I lined with 12mm
marine ply. I now have almost a blank
canvas to set out the wiring as I want it.
For now, I’ve tidied up the wiring a bit
just so that I can see the wood from the
trees, and I now have about a square foot
surface to which I will move all of the
electronics communications (NMEA 0183)
wiring. That’s going to be fun!Russell Eden’s first
boat was his boyhood
6ft inflatable dinghy.
Windsurfing took
over in his teens, and
when sons came
along he bought them
a Laser Pico. A Laser
2000 arrived too, and
ten years of dinghy racing and family
sailing ensued, before the urge to travel
further became a priority and a Cape
Cutter 19 took their place. His wife’s
preference for standing up, and not to
use a bucket for a toilet, saw him buy
Lucy, a 1990 Cornish Yawl, in 2013.
Russell Eden bought his Cornish Yawl Lucy for more comfortable cruisingDylan Winter