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Where there's a will there's a away!

 
If your buying a new boat and having it set up by someone other than yourself I suggest you take care to ensure that your requirements are detailed and that the person or persons doing the work have the appropriate skills to ensure that everything is set up in a way that the components don't conflict, particularly wiring, and that the complete set up will stand the test of time. If you don't the simplest of mistakes may come back to bite you.

That certainly happened with my 5.3 Polycraft which turned out to be a "sleeping giant" that took me a a lot of time and effort to come to grips with and even longer to rectify.

1. The first problem I encountered was fueling up the 120-litre fuel tank. Even at a very slow fill rate at the petrol station browser the boat fuel tank breather backed up and resulted in fuel blowing back out of the filler and being wasted. Persistence finally paid off and the breather was modified making it easier to refuel the boat.

 

2. The second problem was that the fuel gauge stopped working. Unfortunately I have not been able to get that working as well as I would like ... but that is manageable.

 

3. The sleeping giant of a problem was that all the wiring for the original electrics including 2x bilge pumps, radio, navigation lights as well as the transducer cable and of course the steering cabling and control wiring for the Yamaha outboard had all been tightly stuffed into a length of 70mm black flexible piping along the bottom of the the inside of the starboard side of the boat. That piping had obviously been installed when the boat was manufactured and then the inside of the wall of the boat above the piping had been "filled" with polyurethane foam. There was no access to the inside of the wall off the boat or the polyurethane foam or the black pipe ... wow. The piping ran from the stern of the boat to the centre console and was so tightly packed with all the above items that maintenance and upgrades were ridiculously difficult. >
    
   Mixed up with the above was a lack of understanding by the team that set the boat up for me. What they did not take into account was that in running the transducer cable in the same passage way as all the other electrics created electromagnetic interference (EMI) problems with the Garmin sounder. That EMI interference was also likely compounded by the power cable from the 80lb thrust Motor Guide (located on the starboard bow of the boat) electric motor / electric anchor. The wiring for that came into the 24V battery system for the Motor Guide trough the same 70mm hole as all the other wiring and the transducer cable as mentioned above. With the value of 20/20 hindsight I am confident that the closeness of the above two lots of wiring was responsible for interference on my sonar screen.

 
After careful consideration and investigation, I finally got it sorted in my mind and decided I had to progressively upgrade the wiring on the boat to resolve the wiring and EMI conflicts and to make future maintenance and upgrades manageable.
 

 
GARMIN CIRCUIT

As this was the most complicated part of the upgrade that's where I started.

1. Access was a big issue so I started by installing a 22cm inspection port on the inside of the wall of the boat on the port side. The location of that port was critical. The front of the hatch had to be in line with the front of a step that runs across the boat just and butting up to the centre console making the bow floor of the boat about 10cm higher than the stern floor. That bow floor has three hatches. The biggest floor hatch ran from behind the centre console forward to around 4cm behind the anchor well at the front of the boat. I also removed the bait box and rod holder from the port stern of the boat.

 

2. Then I was able to gouge out just enough of the polyurethane form at each end of the port wall of the boat giving me very tight access windows at each end of the polyurethane in the port side wall of the boat.

 

3. From there I used my unorthodox tools to slowly forage away enough polyurethane foam to be able to get access along the inside of that port side wall with a length of "yellow tung".

 

4. With that step behind me the next step was to see if my plan to continue the channel at a right angle from the the hatch (just behind the step) to the back of the centre console for the cables and wiring to run through would work.

 

5. I had already sussed out the inside of the rope locker in front of the centre console and proceed by installing another 22cm hatch (hatch 2) inside that locker from it's front. There was a 10cm gap between the rod locker and the step which continued the full distance across the bow of the boat and the centre console butted up the the step. Whilst working in the rope locker I also drilled a 3cm hole from the port side of the void behind hatch I had just installed into the inside of the centre console.

 

6. Unfortunately there was not enough access between hatch 1 and Hatch 2 to create a channel for the two transducer cables and wiring so what I finished up doing was cutting three 2cm high x 8cm long holes in the front of the step between the two hatches. From there I was able to worry away enough polyurethane foam to complete the channel between Hatch 1 and Hatch 2.

 

7. I still had one channel to install and that was from the 95SV sounder at the bow of the boat along the floor of the rope locker and through a 3cm hole drilled just below hatch number 2. That channel carries the power cable and the cable from the GLS network expander to the 95SV sonar unit at the bow of the boat.

 

8. Once all three channels were complete the next step was to run all the Garmin wiring. Before I could do that I had to buy a network cable and new G56 transducer. I purchased the new G56 transducer because with the original G54 transducer cable was so tightly fitted in the origin wiring channel inside the 70mm black conduit I was not sure it could be taken out undamaged. All the wiring and the LVS32 Panoptics and the new G56 transducer and cable fitted and worked really well once installed as required to each other, the Network Expander, the Black Box and a new Control Panel which I had installed parallel to the original Control Panel but on the opposite starboard side and the same distance from the port side of the centre console as the original hatch is from the starboard side of the centre console. That included bringing across all the Garmin wiring from the original Control Panel on the starboard side of the boat.

 
I am getting great vision on all my Garmin sounder screens now and no longer have the EMI that I suffered when I first purchased the boat.
 
ORIGINAL CIRCUIT

1. Upgrading the original circuit involved removing the G54 Garmin transducer cable from the black conduit. With two us working at opposite ends of the transducer cable we finished up being able to get the G54 cable out of the black conduit channel without damaging it.

 

2. That left just the steering cabling and control wiring for the Yamaha and the wiring for two x bilge pumps, the radio, and navigation lights in the black conduit. That freed up valuable space in the black conduit which I am sure will make future maintenance easier.

 
DC12V to DC24V CHARGER CIRCUIT & MOTOR GUIDE
 

A nifty addition to my Polycraft set up that facilitates longer running hours for the Motor Guide electric motor/anchoring system ws to install a DC12V to DC24V charger in the boat.

1. The top diagram below shows the wiring of the 24V battery system and it's wiring to the Motor Guide electric motor whereas the second photo below shows the DC12V to DC24V charger set up in relation to the crank motor and the 24V battery system.

 

2. The crank motor is a 215 HP Yamaha 4 stroke and it has an alternator that Generates power to primarily keep the Crank Motor fully charged. Power not required to bring the Crank Motor up to full charge goes to D12VC to DC24V charger. It converts the power not required by the Crank Motor from 12V DC to 24V DC and via positive and negative wires up a channel I created using the same techniques I used when setting up the Garmin circuit to the 24V battery system. The red cable goes to the positive terminal of one of the two 12V batteries and the negative cable goes to the negative terminal of the other 12V battery.

 
24V AND MOTOR GUIDE CIRCUIT

 
12V DC to 24V DC BATTERY CHARGER CIRCUIT

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