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I have a Flexofold as pictured. Jim has Max Prop.

Sorry, mixed them up. Noah, any advice on where to buy flexofold these days? I did some googling and did not see much.

Reach out to them directly. Earlier this year I got a quote for a Flexofold 3 blade. They said it would take 3 days to make it and 3 days shipping from Denmark to the East Coast of the US

girm : You didn't mention what type of auto pilot (wheel or steering below).

To get power aft I ran a wire from the batteries (fused) under the aft cabin that way. Much easier that going from the Main Electrical panel.

I also took power from the main electrical panel and went up and then along the cabin to hull joint, thru the head, thru the side locker, to power an aft Loran/GPS repeater.

I like your suggestion of routing the power along the cabin to hull joint. I really want it to come from the electrical panel so that I can turn things on and off from there. The EV-100 draws power, even in standby, and I'd rather be able to shut that off somehow. Not to mention there are already a lot of connections at the battery already (Charging leads, battery voltage monitoring for the panel, main electrical switch, and the Siren Marine monitoring station)

I have the EV-100 installed on my 2006 MKII and it is on a separate breaker on the panel. I'm installing a Balmar battery monitor in the panel this weekend and will have everything exposed so will try to help you out with some pictures from my boat. The install was done professionally before I bought the boat. I'll try to get something posted this weekend.

Let me know when you have the pictures, I would like to see how you did it.

I remember having to deal with this issue, because the top of the nav station Formica ran all the underneath the electrical panel.  Damned if I remember what we did, it was somebody else's boat!   

Stu,

Thanks for the response. You're right about the position of the electrical panel - and I believe it's fiberglass and not formica, but I don't know that for sure. It might be part of the fiberglass insert, for all I know. I haven't taken enough of it apart yet. (For now, the Admiral as forbidden any exploratory surgery with the oscillating multitool... What good is having a cutting tool if you're not allowed to cut anything?!?)

I would snoop around in this area to see what you can find as far as pre-drilled holes into the panel area and see if you can find out a good route.

I have stared at this for a while and thought about using fish tape to thread that part of it. Unfortunately, I can't see where it goes back behind the nav station to get the other end going toward the back of the boat. I suppose I could use the PO's retrofit wire as the messenger line for the new cable, but part of me feels like that's giving up on understanding exactly what's going on back there.

How the heck do you get to the wires that come up behind the chart table and into the electrical panel?

After spending a couple of hours looking and re-looking over how I'm going to route power to the new autopilot I'm installing on the boat, I've come to the conclusion that I'm in over my head. But I'm also ready to admit than and move forward. Since I already installed an EV-100 on my Catalina28, I knew the steps involved, and none of them were overly complicated. The one thing that I wanted to do differently was to run a separate power feed to the autopilot instead of leeching off of the instruments' power like I did on the 28.

First step was to take a look that the pedestal wiring - something that tripped me up with the install on the 28. It looks like there's adequate space to route the extra wires, but everything is sealed in silicone. Not my favorite, but manageable. Next I traced the wires back to the electrical panel. At some point, they disappear behind some fiberglass and appear in the electrical panel. I can't seem to get to that part of the run, however.

A PO ran a new wire to a fan in the aft cabin, so I figured running another wire was doable. But I can't figure out how to get to the electrical wire once it goes back behind the nav table. There's a lot of holes where the cables come up into the electrical area, but where they go into the holes seems to be a completely inaccessible area. There are no messenger lines and no obvious screws, so I feel like I'm missing something completely obvious.

I looked in a bunch of the wiki and 101 articles as well as searching the website (you can imagine there are a lot of articles about electrical and wiring, so I haven't gone through them all), but i can't seem to find what I'm looking for. Is it just a matter of pulling new wires where an old wire exists now? I'd rather do some cleanup of the cable management here, that's why I'm looking for a way into this space.

Have you watched any of Sail Life on the youtubes? 

<Wears "Oh Glorious Sanding tshirt> 

Not to beat a dead horse, but here's a story.

Wife grew up on a boat, and I came to sailing later in life. After 2 years of dinghy sailing lessons and then basic keelboat, we set out to search for our perfect sailboat - a Catalina 30. After three months and dozens of boats, we found nothing that met even our preliminary requirements, my father in law took us aside and asked us this:

"Do you want to spend your time shopping or sailing?"

The point was clear - much like the Pardys "Go small, go simple, go now." We ended up buying a Catalina 28MkI that was seaworthy, but met maybe half of our earlier "requirements". The difference was that we would be on the water in August, with plenty of a season left. We probably put 20k into that boat over the 6 years we owned her and sold her for $18k last year. (Again, did we want to wait for the most amount of money we could get, or did we want to buy a 34?) If we were a bit more selective about the first boat we bought, there were pitfalls that we could have avoided. But then, it would have taken longer to find the right boat. In the end, we had a lot of fun on the 28 and made her a much better boat than when we found her. I wouldn't trade those experiences for any amount of time or money.

I'm not trying to put down your list - these are things that you absolutely need to know about your boat. Clearly you need a boat that is seaworthy. But with a list of requirements this stringent, you're going to shopping for a while. Do you want to shop for boats or sail them?

So as a follow up, I would probably put threaded rod the next time I have to do this. I also realized, once I got most of the handrail on, that the crossthreading happened because the hand rail isn't quite bent into position to fit the holes accurately. When I got to that last hole that was crossthreaded, I put the screw in and started tightening and realized that it was crossthreaded. Looking at it topside, the handrail was slightly off azis from the hole. Getting a helper got the handrail in position and the screw in correctly.

The other thing that the threaded rod gives you is the ability to do this without an assistant. Something I desperately needed. The person who helped me asked "How were you going to get this done without me? There's no way that would have worked without help!" I don't disagree.

Thanks for all your help!

Less Leaky,
Mark

Whenever I redo something, I use new screws and bolts.  I keep the old ones and label where they came from.  I still have a ton of stanchion bolts. 

I'm still trying to figure out what "handrail" bolts you're dealing with as "...the port side stainless hand rail..."  If it's not the pushpit, what is the bolt being tapped into?  My handrails, the old wooden ones, have bolts, nuts and acorn nuts below.  I'm still trying to figure out what you're doing.  I'm rather dense.

Stu - that's for this - my next project is to pull all the stanchions and even after going through this I didn't think about ordering new. I guess I need to make the mistake twice before it sinks in. Since I only budgeted an hour for doing the grab rail (and 4 for the stanchions), if the same ratio holds then it should take a better part of a week to do the stanchions?

Mark

I believe he has stainless steel grab rails on the outside coachroof which replaced the wooden ones that we have in our MKIs. If this is the case, I assume the rails are tapped to take a bolt up from below. I may be totally off base here. If my theory is true I would suggest retapping/chasing/clearing the threads in the base of the handrails, then use threaded rod into the handrails. Once the threaded (studs) are into the handrails—redrill new larger holes in the cabin top that line-up, then fill those with epoxy and redrill, then use butyl tape, nuts and cap-nuts below to secure. If I have your problem/goal all wrong, please disregard!

DING DING! We have a winner!

I have a MkII, which doesn't have the wooden grab rails. Why use threaded rod when I could get another machine screw and not have to deal with nuts and cap nuts? The hole in the cabintop is already way oversize.

How's it going? We bought ours last year and there weren't many on the market.

Could it be a fine vs coarse thread issue?

The threads measured to 18tpi and the 18tpi measurement tool that came with the tap and die set fit into the threads exactly.

Okay, there's at least one coda to the whole story.

Remember how I said that I retapped all the holes to practice? Well, there was a bit of swarf that came from each of them and each one wasn't exactly perfect. Well, once I tried to put the machine screws back into the threads, none of them fit anymore. I know that I used the right tap because the set came with a measuring tool.

Here's what I think happened: As near as I can tell, each of the screws are slightly bent. So I'm guessing that each of the holes were also slightly bent, too? Re-tapping them might have straightened out the holes and not the bent screws don't go in. I can also tell that this had leaked before (corrosion and over-torqueing marks on the screwhead) and I'm wondering if one of the POs knew something was amiss and put it all back - rather than trying to fix it.

The other thing it could be is that my tap and die set from the orange store could be slightly off? I tried re-tapping (re-dying?) the screws and it was taking off a lot of material. I thought that maybe they were metric screws for a minute, but none of the metric sizes were even close to the 5/16" 18tpi. I don't know - maybe there's a metric size that wasn't in the kit that's close.

Anyway, I won't know any more until I get new screws tomorrow.

No matter how long I own a boat, I'm going to keep underestimating how long it takes to do something. Who would have thought I'd have 10 hours into rebedding ONE handrail?

Mark

You could try to re tap the hole the same size. That may clean up the old threads so they hold. Don't over tighten, the threads may be a little thin. If you aren't sure of the thread size, take the bolt to the hardware and they will help you with the right size tap. 
If that doesn't work you can drill and tap for the next size thread. I have seen individual taps packaged with the proper tap drill and that makes the job much easier.
Don't forget to use plenty of oil. If you haven't used a tap, get it started and back it out 1/2 turn to clean out the shavings. Max one turn forward and back out 1/2 turn. Taps are brittle and a broken tap in a hole is not a pleasant experience. If you can, call a friend to help, he may have a tap and die set.
   Hope all goes well.

Phil,

Thanks for all the advice. I bit the bullet and bought a tap and die set. Spent the morning watching people do this on utube and then tried it myself. It seems to have worked!

For all those that run into this, I bought a tap and die set that covers lots of different sizes. If you just want to buy the one specifically for the handrails, they're 5/16" 18tpi. It was a bit nerve wracking. I re-tapped the holes that were fine first, to get the feel of it. That worked out because there was still plenty of 4200 in the threads and re-tapping them got all of that out.

I'm going to re-bed the handrails with some Bed-it buytl tape so that it can be redone at some point in the future without too much need to clean up the threads.

Mark