electrical

[missprint]

hey was just going to tell you my electrical experiences so it can help somebody in the future. I had been having electrical issues with my 28 for 2 years. first year most stuff was minor and we had re powered the boat during that year so there was an easy target to blame everything on. The first thing that happened was the port engine would not turn off when you turned off the key so you had to raise the hatch and pull a relay(did not happen much the first year). we had mech. go over and look, first put in new ingnition and then rewired ignition. Worked for a little while then started back up. But then on a night fishing trip my spreader lights went out seemed light fuse blew but we have breakers not fuses. We were always having problems with batteries going dead after one week or so. well that was the last trip of the summer so just brushed them for the next fishing season. Well get started trying to diagnose problem early and could not find what was wrong i tried posting questions on this web site but had tried most of the advise that was given (thanks fot the help though) and i even talked to Mac 2 or 3 times on the phone. so finally told the mech that i wanted him to stay on the boat till he found what was causing the electrical problems. well after 10 (10*80=800) hours he still could not find it, so i called him up because fishing in a marlin tournament this weekend and need spreader lights, i told him to just rewire them to a new terminal and get my lights working. well when he started he took of the flexible hosing coming from the tower and there it was the PROBLEM. There is a fitting on top of the hardtop that the flexible hosing connect to and that had chaffed 5-6 wires to where they were grounding on the tower. That is why my port engine would not turn off and why my spreader lights did not work. Thanks for all the help and thanks Mac for taking time to try and help also but just wanted to pass along so maybe it want take you so long to figure problem out.

[TwinFin]

Good Post

I wonder if a continuity test could have helped to find some of the shorts? There are a lot of places along our routing paths that are impossible to see without completely removing everything routed through the hardtop and tower support structure.

Just wondering about the ignition problem... Do you have ignition switches in your tower? If not, are you sure the wire chafing above the hardtop would explain the ignition problem?

[missprint]

i do have ignition switches in my tower and what happened is that the ignition wires became chaffed and ground out on the tower.

[TwinFin]

OK

OK - Makes sense.

Thanks!