Nav Light Wiring Repairs
Posted: Sat May 28, 2022 4:49 pm
This year my forward nav light failed after 19 years of faithful service. Bulb was fine but some troubleshooting with the multimeter showed a bad ground wire. Since that wire is routed through the bow pulpit rail, then through the deck behind all of the bow flotation styrofoam and then behind the port side cabin panels all the way back to the switch panel, it is probably the hardest wire on the boat to repair.
Fortunately I have stereo speakers mounted on the “tub” that surrounds the anchor locker in front of the forward hatch so after removing the speaker and spending an hour with a drywall saw cutting the blocks of floatation styrofoam in to smaller chunks that could pulled out of the speaker hole, I was able to access the wire.
It turns out that MacGregor chose that location to put a splice in the wire with big awkward plastic pinch splices just to make it impossible to pull the wire through in either direction and the splice on my ground wire had corroded badly. How did I learn this? By pulling on the wire until it broke at the splice of course! Meaning that now I had to feed a new wire the nav light bracket down to that tub.
My first attempt was a huge fail. I spliced a new wire to the old one at the light and then attempted to pull the other end from inside. It made it to the point where the pulpit rail is bolted to the deck but broke trying to negotiate the tight corner through the hole in the deck. Next attempt was to feed a electrical snake wire from the hole in the pulpit rail where the nave light mounts, backwards down through the pulpit rail and through the deck into the floatation “tub”. This was successful and I was able to feed enough wire through to place some waterproof butt splices at that point.
The rest was easy. Cram all of the chunks of styrofoam back into the tub, put the speaker back, and spend another hour vacuuming styrofoam sawdust out of everwhere.
But my nav light works again!
Fortunately I have stereo speakers mounted on the “tub” that surrounds the anchor locker in front of the forward hatch so after removing the speaker and spending an hour with a drywall saw cutting the blocks of floatation styrofoam in to smaller chunks that could pulled out of the speaker hole, I was able to access the wire.
It turns out that MacGregor chose that location to put a splice in the wire with big awkward plastic pinch splices just to make it impossible to pull the wire through in either direction and the splice on my ground wire had corroded badly. How did I learn this? By pulling on the wire until it broke at the splice of course! Meaning that now I had to feed a new wire the nav light bracket down to that tub.
My first attempt was a huge fail. I spliced a new wire to the old one at the light and then attempted to pull the other end from inside. It made it to the point where the pulpit rail is bolted to the deck but broke trying to negotiate the tight corner through the hole in the deck. Next attempt was to feed a electrical snake wire from the hole in the pulpit rail where the nave light mounts, backwards down through the pulpit rail and through the deck into the floatation “tub”. This was successful and I was able to feed enough wire through to place some waterproof butt splices at that point.
The rest was easy. Cram all of the chunks of styrofoam back into the tub, put the speaker back, and spend another hour vacuuming styrofoam sawdust out of everwhere.
But my nav light works again!
