'Electrical Banana Is Bound To Be The Very Next Phase'

Five points to me for being able to use an obscure psychedelic era lyric from a Scottish singer as a title. The boat is somewhat banana shaped and we are definitely on a electrical phase so the title works. The photo above is what currently lies all over the salon floor of Ceol Mor- ripped out wiring.

With the major repairs finished, its time to move on to the woefully scattered wiring system. I use the term "system" very loosely because what we are actually confronted with might technically be wiring, but so far as Mark can tell there was no system in place. Wires were routed not to prevent loss of voltage or to protect from chafe or anything sensible like that, but to enable the boat yard workers to get to lunch quickly and to knock off work on Friday by 2pm.

I suppose its not entirely fair to castigate Ceol Mor alone for truthfully, any boat would have failed to meet Mark's specifications of what constitutes a "properly wired boat". See, Mark is not just an engineer (Boffin cred +1). He is an electrical engineer (Boffin cred +2). Not only an electrical engineer, but sub seaelectrical engineer (Boffin cred +3). He takes to schematics and transmission line equations like the proverbial duck to water. I tease him to bits about his OCD like precision but truthfully its really kind of great to see him in his element.

After he ripped out the old wiring, he spent a couple of days planning his attack. Above you see his first schematic for the new wiring at the rear of the boat. Each of the dashed subgroups will be getting its own schematic and each individual item a further schematic. Every wire will be properly sized, numbered and documented and all of this information will be handily recorded in the ships log which will make fault finding and wiring in new equipment as straight forward as possible.

I told Mark he should do a schematic of the wiring that came on the boat as a "before" point of reference. He replied that I must be joking because did I realize that not only was there no order to the wiring or the way in which equipment was added and wired in but the time it would take to do this would be a big, big waste of time. I told him that I would rework his present schematic to accurately illustrate what our starting point was. He didn't think I could do it, but I have. Seems he's not the only smarty pants in the family. Go me.