New Fuse Box For Sprite

It's nice to be able to do some work on Sprite for once. A small job, not one of the big jobs that will have to be done at some point in the future.

This weekend I fitted a new electrical fuse/distribution box on Sprite.

I put her on the beach yesterday (ease of access to tools etc) and spent Sunday between tides doing the work.

What spurred this on was recently I started wiring a horn in (the button was fitted to the house for the radio when that was fitted, just never wired in). But during wiring the horn in, when I got to the distribution box there was no more space to fit the wiring in.  To give you some idea, here's the state of the old distribution box:

It was good enough with the old wiring. The wiring was pretty thin gauge and in poor shape and over the years I've upgraded to thicker gauge wiring. The bad news is the thicker wire takes up more space.

Another issue was that some of the tails from the fuse panel were corroding and getting weak.

So in the end I decided to revamp the installation with a new box and just a little upgrade to the fuse panel.

A £10 waterproof plastic box from eBay provided the housing. All I needed to do was solder new tails to the fuse panel and fit the panel to the box. At the same time allowing each connection to have at least one spare terminal for future expansion (except instruments, which has all the connections in place now-famous last words!).

So, I spent all day yesterday doing the deed and came up with this:

Chunky tails soldered to the fuse box, doubled up on the connections to each section and a chunky negative post for all the negative returns to common to. In fact I thing all those negatives are the worst bit. I might look to changing that for something else, or spread the load across two posts instead of just the one.

Here's a close up:

Don't worry about the funky angle of the box, it wasn't screwed to the bulkhead properly.

There is a sticker between the two terminal blocks saying which set of terminals is for which function, but it got covered by all the wires. I'll sort some more labels out another time.

And nearly everything worked afterwards! I've not switched the nav lights on in probably two years and it looks like the wiring for those has corroded away. Certainly the port/starboard lights didn't illuminate, but the rear one (that I wired up after I got Sprite) did work. So more wiring on the cards.

Plus the running and anchor lights on the mast don't work. I checked and there is voltage to the socket on the cabin roof, but I suspect that water has rotted the wiring in the plug to the socket or there's an issue in the mast itself.

Anyway, next on the list then is installing the LED port/starboard nav lights I bought several years ago and possibly converting the rest to LED at some point too.

I'm also toying with the idea of moving the battery isolator switch to the right hand side of the box, so it's all in one and the switch is nicely visible.

It's just nice to be able to spend a decent amount of time on the boat again.