Chip & Debbie Willis on s\v Elegant'sea: Engine room\wiring and plumbing clean up, Debbie in bunny suit

We want to make sure the bilge pump stays in operation though during the clean up.

December 2010 - Currently At Marina Cortez Harbor Island, San Diego, CA

Sunday 12-19-10 we removed a whole bunch of electrical wires etc and a lot of engine room work.

Debbie helped me remove the starting cable from the old Perkins starter to the starter battery. We will replace that with a new 4/0 cable. It is not a marine cable and has no heat shrink.

We re-plumbed the bilge pump to remove a valve and will re-plumb it again on a later time to replace the hose. We might want to replace the through-hole to a larger size as I think it is restricting flow from the Rule 2000 bilge pump.

We removed at least half a dozen dead wires from the engine room that go to the nav station. One was to the original bilge pump which we will re-wire. We got one all the way out but the others we left taped off because we ran out of energy. It was later in the day.

We removed two extra hoses from the shaft housing. We left the one and left it in place so we did not create any siphoning problems.

Cabinet by the sink on right side. 1978 Islander Freeport.

Under sink and in back of sink. Our sink was out during this project as it was getting a new faucet that we installed.

We removed some antenna wires from the winch handle storage cabinet under the stairs. That was nice, been wanting to do that for a while. Just one other e wire in there now to the mast. We will re-snake it out to the binnacle at a later date and the cabinet will be free of wires.

We found and researched the cables going to last of four selector switches that were on board and re-wired it so now we have one cable from the nave station selector switch going to the batteries. We will replace that with a new cable. Now we have just one selector switch on board. Also these cables went through our food storage are under the stairs so that was ugly. Battery cables with the food? Luckily most were in place that were not scene. That was nice as there was not any cosmetic damage but for the one by the seat at the nav station. We will add one selector switch by the starting battery for emergencies. We will then be able to select the house batteries to start the engine if need be.

We disconnected the stern anchor windlass and will replace the cables from it. The ground was going to the engine. We will replace it with a new ground cable that will go to the Blue Sea Systems PowerBar 600A BusBar ground bus we installed. Any wires going through the heat of the engine room loos 20% because of the heat. Any way this way we can monitor it with the Link 2000 also.

Debbie spent a lot of time in the engine room (bilge) removing the staples and screws and cleaning etc. Some more of that and we will be ready for paint.