Catalina 30 Rat's Nest

[daletournier]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

It's an OCD thing. As long as the wires go to the right places and the ends are good it only matters in your head. Yeah I like a nice OCD layout just like the next guy, with right angle bends etc. But really... No one told the electrons it matters!
I spent a ton of time once making one nice, what I found was it was all to tight to use the hinged door well, and put more stress on the wires and fittings!

Id aree with this. I deliberately leave a little more wire, dosent look great but is more functional imho. What i dont like is when people leave old wires doing nothing in there,then it becomes spaghetti and achieves nothing.

[CatNewBee]

Not too bad.

The blue Current-Steel thinghy I would eliminate, this is a built-in failure to come. Either solder and isolate with shrink tube or connect wires to the distribution points.

Remove the keys and tools on the side, if they fall off there will be a nice shortcut in your panel, place them away somewhere else. Checkout the shunt wiring in the middle There should not be a connection on the battery input side, except for a voltmeter minus cable, but then it would be better to connect the wire to the battery pole directly.

The meter in the bottom right corner is out of function, maybe you replace it with something meaningful.

Below the top power distribution is a plan or something, check and update it, make a new one when finished, laminate it and place it somewhere handy inside.

You have a positive and negative distribution bar, what is great, also cables are labeled. I would shrink tube all the plugs to the switches and fuses down to the bottom, not just on the crimp area.

What are this car lights inside about? maybe you find a better solution to illuminate the compartment.

There is an antenna plug on the left with no function.

If you have some slack, you can easy organize this mess. Make a connection board on the back side for all outgoing cables, and connect the switch-board by short cables to this distribution point and keep all positives together and all negatives by a single thick cable to the bus bar, distribute from here. This helps you when you plan to replace the panel one day and also to measure with a voltmeter everything on a central place. I even would put a connection plug point for the negative probe of a voltmeter for easy connection when troubleshooting.

I assume the whole nest is a 12V installation only, no shore power inside. Otherwise you must separate the panel and the lines for the two power trains and isolate them from each other, also do more to protect yourself from electrocute-shock. They should be in best case in separate isolated panels or at least separated isolated parts and separate wiring channels.

I cannot judge on cable quality, they do not look marine grade, but I guess, hey will work for a while.

[rgleason]

I like marine sail on marinehowto.com method for labeling, using labeler and cleat heat shrink over the label, direct to the wire. The label ties will interfere and get old fast.

[iyamwhatiyam]

Originally Posted by jharding

I now have a tool that I wish I had when I rewired my boat. It is a tone generator, you hook one part on the end of a wire and then can use the wireless box to find the wire with the tone in it anyplace on the boat. it saves a lot of time wiggling and pulling on wires. I had two lawn and leaf garbage bags full of old unused wires, yours looks much better than mine did.

Is this the tool of which you speak? Looks like what the phoneco uses.
https://www.amazon.com/Tracer-Circui.../dp/B00ADHQCIO

[Stu Jackson]

Before you do anything, ANYTHING, you need to keep reading.


But not so much as to how to label wires or even connect them.


Most important is to understand two things:


1. How it was designed and installed the year it was built
2. What improvements you want to make


1. You already have the wiring diagram. Learn how the alternator charges the batteries, for example. When your boat (and mine) were built, and still to this day unfortunately, builders ran the AO (alternator output) through the 1/2/B switch.


2. These days, most all reputable boat electrical leaders in their field recommend the AO go to the house bank.


So before you go ripping things out, figure out what you have and then what you want. You'll find, as I did in 1998 when we bought our 1986 boat, that a few simple changes, simple as moving a wire from one post to another, is all that it took to make some good improvements.


You can learn a lot here:


Electrical Systems 101


Some of the International Catalina 30 Association website links go back to our C34 website. If you have an M25 or M25XP engine, the C34 tech wiki has a tremendous amount of information.


Good luck, work hard, its worth it.

[rgleason]

Iyam, Stu makes a very good point. You'll likely want to consider some changes.

[boatpoker]

I believe you have more serious issues than what is being suggested (I previously had Marine electrical certification). send me an email at boatpoker@gmail and I will respond with the ABYC Electrical Standards. Given what I see there I'd suggest you start with the standards regarding AC ground/neutral separation, AC/DC separation and bonding of AC ground and DC negative.

[coopec43]

Well I don't see anything wrong with that wiring: at least you can follow where the wires go to/from.

I'm still wiring mine as I'm adding circuit breakers, terminal and bus bar boxes and master switches but mine looks similar. Someone said it would look neater if I bundled the cables together with table ties! (The switchboard is hinged at the bottom so the wires have to be longish but I like it that way so I can make modifications)

All my circuits are separate but there are lots of them. The only thing I have "daisy chained" are lights but I have several separate circuits for those.

One thing I do plan to do it tag each cable pair to make following the wiring a little easier. These sets of numbers can be bought on eBay for a few dollars each set and they are designed to clip over the cable.


Clive

[LoudMusic]

Professionally my company uses wrap-around cable labels. You can get them in rolls or sheets. The rolls obviously require a special printer, which we typically use, but the sheets can go through desktop printers.

We number each cable and put a label on each end that has the cable number and the name of the hardware that is attached on each end. This information is repeated three times on each label so it's easy to spot in a crowded cabling area. That way whichever end you're looking at you know where it goes to. There is also the reference number you can look up to identify what kind of cable it is and any additional information about its path in our database.

I don't believe all that effort is required on our small(ish) boats, but I DEFINITELY prefer the wrap-around labels to pretty much anything else I've seen. There is an opaque white space for printing on, and then an inch or more of transparent section to wrap over the white space and protect the printing. It makes the cable somewhat less flexible at the label, but still superior to all alternatives I've dealt with.

Example: https://cdn.labtag.com/wp-content/up...29-Closeup.jpg

On that mysterious day in the future when I have hours with nothing to do I plan to start cleaning up, documenting, and labeling my rat's nest of cabling.

[P3sailor]

If considering rewiring the entire vessel, adding more equipment, etc. you may want to consider performing a load analysis of the entire electrical system. This is something we always did when refurbing aircraft. I realize we're beating this topic to the hilt but never assume that the electrical system can handle all of the upgrades.

[CatNewBee]

Originally Posted by P3sailor

If considering rewiring the entire vessel, adding more equipment, etc. you may want to consider performing a load analysis of the entire electrical system. This is something we always did when refurbing aircraft. I realize we're beating this topic to the hilt but never assume that the electrical system can handle all of the upgrades.

IF you want to do this on a larger vessel or catamaran, consider having some power distribution points depending on the size and type of the vessel where you bring thick wires from the battery or switchboard and then spread out to the loads from here using a breaker panel instead to lead all wires to one central point and have lots of wires going back and forth. It makes it easier if you want to add something without the need to run new wires through the whole boat.

The load analysis is a god point, always put a circuit breaker on the beginning of a wire according to its size. If you go from large to small wires, insert a breaker at this point, if you stay on the same wire gauge - no problem..

High-amp appliances, like inverter etc. should be located near the batteries or have at least their separate cabling to the battery distribution bus bars (power winches, windlass, water maker etc). Sometimes it may make sense to place an extra (small) battery near the device to provide the high current on demand instead of running very thick cables across with a large voltage drop. (bow-truster, genny start battery, windlass in the bow)

Usually the electric system does not feed all the devices at the same time, so no need to oversize it to the maximum possible load. If you use an automatic breaker with reset function, you will be ok, if you accidently overwhelm the system it will protect the wiring, and you can easy recover from the outage.

I would separate the current path of vital systems from the current path for living space from the battery distribution on, so an accidental overload on the house causing a flip of the main breaker does affect navigation electronics, communication and lights.

[Time2Go]

Originally Posted by LoudMusic

Professionally my company uses wrap-around cable labels. You can get them in rolls or sheets. The rolls obviously require a special printer, which we typically use, but the sheets can go through desktop printers.

We number each cable and put a label on each end that has the cable number and the name of the hardware that is attached on each end. This information is repeated three times on each label so it's easy to spot in a crowded cabling area. That way whichever end you're looking at you know where it goes to. There is also the reference number you can look up to identify what kind of cable it is and any additional information about its path in our database.

I don't believe all that effort is required on our small(ish) boats, but I DEFINITELY prefer the wrap-around labels to pretty much anything else I've seen. There is an opaque white space for printing on, and then an inch or more of transparent section to wrap over the white space and protect the printing. It makes the cable somewhat less flexible at the label, but still superior to all alternatives I've dealt with.

Example: https://cdn.labtag.com/wp-content/up...29-Closeup.jpg

On that mysterious day in the future when I have hours with nothing to do I plan to start cleaning up, documenting, and labeling my rat's nest of cabling.

Having done many thousands of cables and many
studio build outs in
Audio/Video/Film industries the above is
100 % the way to do it.
Both ends indentiified and numbered
all data entered into a database.
In fact this should be done BEFORE you snip
the first wire. The whole boat should be laid out
on paper first. My memory is a bit foggy on it
but I think we used a program called
WireCad. If you decide to use cable ties
Do yourself a big favor and buy a tie-wrap gun
You can preset tension and it cuts clean without
the razor sharps barbs that will surely get you
sometime.
Cheers
Neil

[LoudMusic]

Originally Posted by Time2Go

Having done many thousands of cables and many
studio build outs in
Audio/Video/Film industries the above is
100 % the way to do it.
Both ends indentiified and numbered
all data entered into a database.
In fact this should be done BEFORE you snip
the first wire. The whole boat should be laid out
on paper first. My memory is a bit foggy on it
but I think we used a program called
WireCad. If you decide to use cable ties
Do yourself a big favor and buy a tie-wrap gun
You can preset tension and it cuts clean without
the razor sharps barbs that will surely get you
sometime.
Cheers
Neil

My installer team uses standard Panduit wire ties and flush cut nippers to clean cut the ends. They get yelled at and potentially pay docked for leaving hazardous wire ties in the equipment racks. I personally have scars on my arms from working in bad installations.

One of our principals got his start working in concert equipment installation. Sounds like he learned the same stuff you did and has introduced it into our business!

[bpratt1152]

Yep, that looks very similar to my 1983 Catalina 30's Nav station. I too am contemplating cleaning it up by installing bus bars. The issue is so far it works, so other priorities move to the top of the list.

[coopec43]

I think you should make an effort to understand the wiring then label the cables as to their use. Once you've done that then you could see if you can make it more logical and easier to understand.

I wouldn't look at the wiring on your Catalina and announce it is a real mess because none of them look pretty. Here is the wiring on "Dream Away" which as far as I'm concerned is quite typical.