Ripped out 50 yards of extraneous wiring from engine room

This deserves a post of its own, even though it was just a big clean up project.

When we purchased the boat, I was most overwhelmed by the wiring of the boat.  It was utterly undecipherable to me, for months.  I spent hours looking at the original engine wiring diagram from Perkins, and the regulator wiring diagrams from Quad Cycle (no longer in existence, which didn’t help things).  Hours staring at the engine and cursing in frustration at the dozens of identical looking wires wrapped up in duck tape (rendering individual wires untraceable).  Yet more hours drawing up new arrangements and placements for bus bars and terminal blocks to organize things.

In the process of figuring it out, I discovered that it was made more confusing by a ton of extra, old wiring that lead nowhere, and also by some really fucked up wiring choices that had a single wire crisscrossing the engine room multiple times unnecessarily.  Piece by piece I discarded unneeded stuff.  There were two really big days, where I tossed enough garbage wiring out of the engine room to make a big rats nest pile in the cabin.  The old engine wiring was completely encased in ancient black electrical tape, which was all gooey and black, and all of the wires running to the instruments were at least 8 feet too long (no one bothered to shorten the wires as it came from the engine manufacturer, I presume).  The key switch, which is less than 3 ft away from the starter battery, was pulling it’s power from the starter solenoid across the room; twice a hot wire went an additional 4 ft past a perfectly functional terminal block, to be spliced into the middle of another wire directly under the wettest part of the engine.  I discovered the original alternator regulator hidden underneath the solenoid, with much of the wiring still spliced in place all over (this despite the fact that we have a nice regulator mounted elsewhere, with a backup regulator mounted right next to it).  The list goes on, but you get the idea.

Now it is organized, with clean connections, in the simplest arrangement that I could come up with, and it is reasonably easy to trace the wires when necessary.  And I drew up a big schematic of the whole shabang.