Boat Schematic

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  • A schematic system of a Catalina 22

    On Saturday, April 5, 2003, at 07:45 AM, Gary H. Lucas wrote:

    Some time ago there was a discussion about electrical wiring and wiring diagrams vs. schematics. I promised I would do a schematic for comparison. I have sent the Schematic in PDF format to both Jason Wyatt and Skip Meisch so they could post it on their web sites for eveyone to view.

    The drawing is basicly the same circuitry as the wiring diagram previously posted, except I embelished it a little to illustrate how you might add other electrical devices. My schematic shows two batterys with a selector switch, a volt meter, solar panel, outboard generator, and 12 volt receptacles not shown on the original drawing.

    Note that the schematic clearly illustrates HOW the wiring works, NOT how it is physically wired. This is very useful for trouble shooting purposes. Note also that I numbered the wires and skipped over a few numbers when I went from page to page. This allows additions to the drawing without messing up the number sequence on each page. Wire numbering is a really good idea, especially when you only have a few colors of wire available to work with.

    Please note that the drawing does not indicate the BEST way to wire. It shows a perfectly acceptable wiring diagram, but there are many ways it could be improved. If you look at the wiring for the instruments you'll note that one fuse on the main panel and it's associated switch feed all the instruments, but each instrument has it's own in-line fuse shown. This is called coordinated protection. If the radio shorts out it blows it's own smaller fuse before it will blow the main panel fuse, which would turn off all your instruments. When one thing fails it shouldn't stop you from losing everything else.

    Gary H. Lucas
    C22 #8456
    Scraping Bottom

  • PDF file

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