S/V Deep Playa - Pearson 424

Here’s a shot of the Signet System 4000 instruments package which I finally removed. I can’t find anything out about this on the internet. The big black box was mounted on the electrical panel, the remaining hole is approximately 12”x8”! Did I mention the “display” feature on this 12”x8” are those four red single digit displays (about 1”x2”). At one time there were depth, wind and knot meters. When I purchased the boat only the wind and knot meters were operational. I pulled out all of the wiring and the head unit. I also think at some point there was a pedestal mounted display of some kind because I also pulled a wire labeled display out from under the cockpit that ran up into the pedestal.

I’m going to jury rig the Maretron DSM250 into that huge hole and at some point replace the entire wood panel holding all of the electrical and electronics.

There’s a shot of my Maretron DSM250 (in red on block mode) displaying data from my NMEA 200 network I finished roughing in last night (or I guess this morning) about 0200. I’m calling it a rough-in because I still need to go back and secure all the wiring, mount the display and the GPS, etc. but I was to plug it all together, fire it up and it worked right out of the gate!

Here’s a shot of the a “T” installed showing the backbone in blue and the drop cable in grey. The black fitting is a field installed fitting whereas the other two are factory pre-installed fittings. The field installable connector has some pretty small screws and was a tad tricky to line everything up, but that is probably due to my large meat hooks. I was able to do it just fine. The waterproof fitting that goes over it all was very tight and I’m sure it has a great seal.

right now I have the following in my system:

• Color Display DSM250
• Weather Station WSO100
• Compass SSC200 (installed)
• GPS Antenna GPS200

I plan to add a depth\speed\temperature gauge to replace my Standard Horizon DS50 depth only unit, but I’m waiting for Airmar’s DST900 to come out (it’s a year late according to rumor) which has the D/S/T and no moving parts! That will be awesome! For now, I’m going to Magruber the DS50 onto the network and maybe if that works fine I’ll just live with that (hurry up Airmar!). We also want to add a rudder angle indicator. I just haven’t gotten to that yet.

Tonight I’ll secure all the wiring and figure out where the GPS will be placed.

Here’s a shot of Dawn at the masthead installing the stop on the sail track as the sun sets at Shilshole Bay Marina. You can see a close-up here.

I would have installed it when the mast was in the yard, but it was missing for awhile. Now it’s installed back where it belongs.

I’ve mostly been working on the rigging lately, but tonight I’m thinking about the NEMA 2000 powertap installation. The Maretron powertap looks like a normal NMEA 2000 T but it has MID\Micro cord coming out of T which you wire up to the DC power system in your boat along with a 4amp fuse (See yellow powertap in the picture). Maretron has a good knowledgebase article on how to do the install but in summary you wire a couple of wires to the 4amp fuse and DC +and the rest to DC –.

I have some other DC wiring I need to clean up that is wired directly off the batteries with no fuses and I don’t want to use a bunch of inline fuses, so I’m going to use a Blue Sea Fuse Block to fuse all these individual items, but do so in a way where I have a single spot to do troubleshooting and add-on future circuits.

I’m hoping to pick up the fuse block tomorrow so I can put in the T which is the first step to getting my NMEA2000 instruments online.

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Categories: Destinations - Puget Sound