My wife wanted another fishing boat after we sold the Walk-Around so I bought a 14 year old Key West 186DC last year. I like buying old boats because I love working on them. Anyway, I've redone the wiring, added a robot trolling motor and replaced the dash and gauges. I pulled something out of the wiring that looked like a pig's brachiocephalic trunk (I remember that from advanced biology in high school but I did have to look up the spelling). I amazes me how these boats are usually wired with so many single points of failure. Everything now is single point-to-point with fuses instead of breakers. The two main runs from the starting/house battery box to the starboard console weren't fused in the back at all. I now have fuses in the rear starboard console for every run out and fuses in the branches wired from the drivers console.
I like Yamaha's digital gauges but the sun ruins the screens and LCD displays and it's $700 to replace them so I went with old-school analog gauges and replaced the corroding and cracking aluminum panels with a fake burl wood panel. They had a panel pattern they called Carbon Fiber that I really liked but I thought the odd angles of the dash panels would make the square pattern in the carbon fiber look screwy so I went with the wood. Working the panel material is a pain. Power tools just melt the plastic and clog the blades so I had to cut everything out with a coping saw. I used a power sander and Dremel tool to smooth the edges - the melted edges look clean.
The old radio really sounded good but didn't last but a year after I bought the boat. I replaced it with a $100 marine Sony. It sounds okay but has USB and bluetooth for music and can make and receive phone calls.
I put a 4.2A dual USB charge port on the Starboard panel and one in the glove box.
All the lights are upgraded to LED.
I think I like working on a boat more than I do fishing out of it...
Bookmarks