2010 Boat Boat Build Logs
This customer arrived at my shop with his Velocity 280 Powerboat complaining of unimpressive output from his audio system that another shop had installed at a premium price point. I agreed to inspect and advise. My inspection resulted in the unfortunate news: it’s all gotta go! Marine electrical work requires an extra level of care in order to accomplish properly and the caliber of work executed on this installation was substantially less than acceptable.
The beautiful watercraft as it arrived:
Some of the atrocious wiring practices were revealed as I dug deeper and deeper into the installation. Stripped/exposed wiring, unnecessary noise filters being used as RCA-extensions that were limiting frequencies provided to the amplifiers, multiple redundant wire runs indicative of multiple attempts for band-aid fixes, crimped wiring hidden behind panels, mounting screws going through speaker wiring, so on and so forth. No bueno.
Phase 1: all new wiring!
I removed all the speaker and power wiring and started from scratch and ran everything fresh with high quality Stinger Pro OFC wire. Here’s a fun before/after comparison behind a panel… or should we say the “their shop vs Superior Mobile difference”…
Here’s some post-rewire glamour pictures of the boat in the shop with a big pile of trash wire next to it.
Then for phase 2…
Let’s put in a bunch of new speakers!
The front 6.5″ Kenwoods were replaced with new 7″ Rockford Fosgates. The Kenwoods were relocated to inside the boat’s cabin and deck-powered.
Underneath the rear seat, there was a single 10″ subwoofer and two 8″ woofers sharing the same air space. Yuck, terrible plan. The two 8″s were removed and two 10″s were installed in their place. Additional sheets of 1/2″ expanded PVC were cut to fit and bonded to the original mounting locations in order to provide a more rigid mounting surface.
Now to address those rear 8″ Rockford Fostgate speakers. They definitely sounded blown but they didn’t even look properly installed. The tweeter was off center and the grill just looked weird. I had to dig further.
Oh. Wow. Okay. See how there’s a 1/2″ thick layer on the bottom right corner where the handle mounts? Well that needed to be trimmed back to install the speaker properly. The opposing side required the same treatment. These were replaced with brand new Rockford Fosgate 8″ marine woofers. Same speakers, just installed correctly now and wired up correctly so they won’t blow.
The amplifiers are thoroughly under-powered for this caliber of a system… but at least now they’re wired up a lot cleaner and tuned properly. Phase 3 is upcoming and includes upgrading to marine amplifiers with significantly higher power ratings.
Finished interior pictures:
That’s all folks!
-13-