Replacement Instruments
On Papillon, we have just replaced all the old round-faced instruments with a new set of square Navman units. They included Speed, Depth, Wind, and a Repeat for down at the nav table. They are awesome and make me wish I had done this before. We got them on sale at a local chandlers (Steveston Marine in Vancouver) for $1149 CDN (approx $930 US) including all the transducers. To be fair, we did pick up the "In Hull Puck" transducer for the depth sounder for an additional $72 CDN ($58 US) because I didn't want another hole in our boat! BTW, the puck works great, giving readings down to more than 600 feet before it starts to lose the bottom. The PO had installed a new mast head pickup and cable before we purchased the boat 2 years ago, but neglected to give us the instruments themselves. We used the cable he had run to connect our new unit to with no problems whatsever. Wiring was virtually new anyway. The previous instruments had the 4+" round holes cut into the cockpit bulkhead but the Navman units only require a 2" circular hole to mount into. Not being at all proficient with epoxy and fibreglass, we looked for a way to cover the holes (which were almost, but not quite, covered by the new instruments. The solution we came up with was Starboard squares, 1/2" x 4.75" x 4.75" screwed and bonded with 3M 4200 adhesive over the existing holes, drilled out with the 2" openings for the new instruments. Worked great! Looks acceptable, and if I do become more daring with my "glassing" ability in the future, they are relatively easy to remove. I will upload pictures in another post (they are on a laptop at home). We chamfered the edges to give the Starboard a more finished look. I would do it again the same way if I had to do it over. BTW, an added bonus is that the new instrument heads only intrude about 3/4" into the "cabinets" mounted on the inside of the bulkhead giving us some real handy storage space where before the soup-can-sized backs of the old Kenyon heads permitted only minimal storage.