replacement Whitlock dash panel

[jeffatoms2]

Things have been a bit slow lately at work so we have branched out and we have been making items for our 1998 Bavaria 38 Ocean, Zephyrus, our remarkable boat.  At the shop we have a 11 foot by 6 foot CAD/CAM waterjet cutting table, laser engravers and other fun, capable and cool tools so I set out to make parts for our boat that aren't readily available.

Our first project was to get rid of original 27 year old the Autohelm dash/helm navigational instruments and the original Garmin GPS and replace them with newer, slightly used and slightly almost free Raymarine gear, including a mini chartplotter/depth contour readout, onto the same dash footprint.  Most of the original stuff had dull screens or was becoming unreliable.

Due to the sizes and cutouts for the new gear, the original fiberglass panel could not be modified and recut to fit the new instruments, however all of the original wiring could be re-used.

We've done the same project on other boats and we have the process pretty well figured out.  Basically we took off and disconnected the old dash, marked the wires, taking lots of photos, traced out the panel with a Sharpie pen onto a oversized piece of butcher's paper, scanned it into the computer, digitized it, created a cut path file on the computer from the digital scan, verified measurements and cut it out onto a new piece of 1/4 plywood. This created our prototype dash "plug" #1.

From there, we verified the fit including alignment of the original screw mounting holes to the Whitlock pedistal.  If adjustments were needed, the digital file would have been modified and the process repeated.  From there, we test fit the new gear by placing the plastic sun covers in their desired locations, moving them around on the plug until they looked good.  We then obtained the PDFs cutout files from Raymarine's internet site for the wind, depth, speed, autopilot and chartplotter.  We overlayed the imported PDFs onto the original digital template we created earlier and cut a second prototype from UHMW.  FYI, the Raymarine PDFs had both the outlines of the sun covers and the cutouts, making placement easy (so does Garmin-FYI).

We then mounted the new gauges to the UHMW and connected the new dash up to the original wiring.  The only new wire we had to run was for the new CHIRP depth transducer which we mounted inside the hull just aft of the keel but before the rudder in the bilge.  Note the new chartplotter has an internal GPS that required no new wiring.

My goal was to get all of the "new" instruments into the same space as the originals.  The truth is it's pretty tight as you can see from the photos but it worked quite well and all in, I think we spent less than $250US (our net cost) to run through it twice.  I'll be fine tuning it onto #3 sometime this winter as it was too close to the compass but the proof of concept worked quite well, according to plan.  Typically three iterations are necessary on this type of project just right, hence the use of cheap materials thus far.

Note that we now have redudancy galore.  In addition to two radar equipped Raymarine E80s aboard, each with their own GPSs, we now have bow and stern depth, one set to water depth below with the keel (bow) and waterline depth at the stern.  Though we actually purchased a new masthead wind instrument, it turned out that the old dash instrument was faulty, not the masthead, so we have a spare.  Additionally, we like and know the Raymarine ST5000+ autopilot but still replaced it with the same and we will soon have a spare there when I replace its LCD ($100 in parts).  The final bonus is once I add AIS signals to the helm, we will only have to swing out the big companionway chartplotter when we use radar, freeing up access to get below decks.

Photos to follow.

[jeffatoms2]

Here are a few more before and after photos.  Like I implied, the electronics were all original 1998 delivery equipment.  The "new" stuff is a combination of "new but never used or installed", "refurbished" or "gently used." Most importantly, the price was right.  All of the "new" stuff is less than 15 years old as opposed to approaching 30 years.  Raymarine stuff certainly was made to last.