The minimum task I set myself on this cold and wet Saturday was to get the battery hooked up to the controller and the controller wired up to the bus bars in the switch box. Anything after that would be a bonus.
So, starting with the battery cable. I cut off the old ends of the cable, then stripped the individual cores and put on these ferrules using the kit that I bought when constructing my CNC Router.
These fit nicely into the controller connector and I repeated the process with a short length of cable with ferrules on one end and eyes on the other to connect the controller to the bus bars and a similar cable from the bus bars to the USB charging hubs, although this had eyes on the bus bar end and bare, tinned wire at the other to fit into the lever connectors.
Here is the result with the battery connected. Already past the minimum task and time to break for lunch. As the USB charging hub has a switch built in, the cable from there ran directly to the bus bars as you can see from the photo.
After lunch I turned my attention to the switch box, starting by covering as much of the bare wires on the back of the switch panel with heat-shrink sleeving. Being careful not to get the hot air gun too close to the acrylic panel, of course. For the moment I’ll only be using one of the switches, the one for the navigation lights.
Using a combination of lever connectors, eyes and a spade connector, the cables to the navigation lights were connected to the bus bars and the switch.
This is the result with the switch panel screwed back to the box. Fairly neat and tidy, but I’ll be securing the cables a little better once the cable clips and brass nails arrive, hopefully tomorrow.
So, did it work? Well, two of the three navigation lights turned on when the switch was thrown, the other didn’t have a bulb installed. That was an easy job to fix but even with the bulb in place, the nav light didn’t illuminate. On closer inspection I found that the bulb holder had broken some time in the past and had been glued back together with epoxy. This also meant that the centre pin in the holder that should have connected to the bulb no longer moved and was stuck in the fully retracted position, meaning that it didn’t touch the bulb.
Not to worry, thought I, I’ll just order a new one.
Only I seems that you can’t get them any more, which might explain why the broken one was glued together.
What I need is a brass bulb holder for a BA15S bulb that is threaded on the outside of the body and had screw rings. I can find ones for BA15D and lots for BA22 bulbs, but not for the BA15S.
So, I have ordered the best ones I can find and I’ll figure out how to mount them once they arrive.
Currently, the ship’s battery is out in the cockpit since I need to get into the battery box when replacing the centreplate case and I needed the cable to be long enough to do this. But I must replace those awful crocodile clips! More things to order.
Time for a cup of tea.