involves wiring.
When I bought my sailboat back in about '85 it was about 17 years old and had gone through the installation and removal of a number of electric/electronic items. If course as new items were installed the old wiring was left in place. They'd just cut the ends off and leave the wiring in place. Sometimes they'd simply leave the unservicible unit in place.
Of course there was no reasonably readable color code or anything. Most of the wiring was done using whatever big spool of wire the previous owners had on hand. Of course, ot was all the same color, black.
One day right after I got a hefty payoff for a job I went straight to the auto house and got several small spools of wire in different colors. I did get a big spool of green as it waas to be the negative terminal which would be common to everything electrical/electronic.
When I got back to the boat I disconnected everything and if the unit didn't work I pitched it. Then I went through the entire boat and pulled every single inch of wire in it and one at a time I rewired everything. Every single thing got a new seperate colored wire. I even pulled the mast and rewired the masthead and running light. Every single inch of the boat was rewired.
As I went along I wrote down carefully what was what. The whole thing was a neatly organized project and everything was easy to understand. Everything worked and had a purpose and there were no unused wires. They were neatly run and fastened in place where they could easily be traced in case somehing went wrong. If a wire corroded internally it could be replaced easily.
There was also a written out chart listing what color was what that I stapled to the inside of the top of the battery box. The battery box top was removable and could be put upside down on a counter or the table instead of having to hunch over to read it. What was also important is there was plenty of room at the bottom of the color code chart to add things as time passed on.
When I was done I showed my handiwork off to a couple of friends of mine with pride and to my surprise I got offered a couple of jobs here and there wiring in things on fishboats.
But what was more important is that the next time something went wrong it was a snap to repair it.
As time passed I added a couple of things and if it was a case of a direct placement, say I got a new VHF radio I'd simply reuse the wiring because why bother.
If it was a new device such as the updated Loran that displayed in Lat Long and freed me up from having to get charts with the Loran C interpolar lines it got its own seperate colored wire.
One problem with redoing something is that after it's redone people tend to go back into their sloppy ways and mickey mouse things again and eventually wind up at Square One again. It's easier to keep it up as you go along.
One other thing also is that if something becomes outdated and isn't used anymore then get rid of it. This does NOT mean just cutting the wires and pitching the item. It means going through the wiring and removing the now unused wire and simplifying the wiring harness.
The other thing I did was replace the switch/fuse panel. It was inadequate as there had been things mickey moused since the boat was launched. I added three or four switches which were wired to various devices and on top of that I added four spares, leaving room for growth. I laid it out carefully and took the home made panel ashore for drilling on a drill press. I wanted it perfect and it was.
The panel itself was made of steel instead of aluminum because steel can be painted easily. Once it was drilled out and fitted I carefully spray painted it. A couple coats of primer and a several coats of the final color. It looked damned good.
What inspired me to write this is I was recently asked to look at the 'wiring locker' of a vessel and saw a huge plate of spaghetti where stuff had been added and added and nothing removed. It was a can of worms and it's well past time that someone go through it and remove a decade's worth of leftover unused leftover units associated unused wall warts and useless doodads and all sorts of crap. I said I wouldn't touch something like that with a ten foot pole until it gets cleaned up and everything in it gets squared away.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this:
http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
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