Next on the list was trying to come up with a way to protect all my wiring and cables, running from the front to the back of the boat. I decided I wanted some type of PVC to use as a conduit. After doing some measuring and figuring out what I needed I went with some 2" and 1" Electric PVC Outdoor Piping and a few couplings.
Here is the 2" pipe running along the side. This conduit is where my cable throttle controls will run, along with misc. electrical wiring for accessories, lighting, etc.
Now, I couldn't use all the 2" piping to the front, due to my side panels tapering from the top to about 1.5", thus making the 2" pipe not fitting and keeping the panel from being mounted flush with the brackets. So I cut the 2" and used some 1" pipe with a reducing coupling. The smaller pipe is only going to have wires for lights and maybe some speaker wire in it, so I really didn't need much room. I do plan on adding a bow mounted TM, but the battery for that will be going into the front of the boat (where the front hatch is located), so I am not concerned about trying to fish larger wires through the smaller pipe.
Here is the end of the smaller pipe with a swoop attached and right underneath the bow deck. I used my fishing tape to test the set up and see how well I could pull wires through. There were no problems getting the steel tape through the piping.
This pic here is before I installed the piping. The two red circles indicated where the pipe needed to go, with the line kind of showing how I wanted it to flow. This area is the starboard cavity-well, which is going to be filled with pour-in expansion foam.
To get the 2" pipe to bend somewhat to the shape I needed, I used my torch to heat it up and bend it to the desired shape, so it could attach to the coupling and the swoop on the bottom. It doesn't take to much heat to do this method, but you need to be careful heating it up to much. Trying to bend it without heating it up was not going to work. I did try using my heat gun first, but it was just not producing enough heat and would have taken a long time to do. You can see some scorching (where the bend is) but that was just from the film that was on the pipe. The integrity of the pipe remained in tact with no issues and is quite rigid. Just make sure to keep the pipe in the desire shaped as it cools down. I just used my hands to hold it together. Also wear some pretty thick gloves. The heat from the pipe is to hot to handle with bare hands while it cools.
I also did the same thing with the swoop. The hole on the bottom of the cavity is an oval shape, and was not letting the swoop pass through. I just heated up the end and shaped it, then passed it through.
So if you need to bend some pipe, use a torch. It be even easier to have a pipe bender on hand and shape it that way, but I didn't have one. I did all my torching of the pipe outside the boat. I also used piping glue on the couplings to keep everything together, to ensure it wouldn't come undone. I'll secure the piping with stainless steel hose clamps later on down the road.
After that was done, I started to concentrate on the panel where my remote controller was going to be installed. This is the reason why I didn't get the floor installed yet. I wanted to make sure I could mount the controller and run the throttle cables and the steering cable, without any issues before I installed the floor.
The red circle shows where my cables would be ran through (to the conduit) and the red square highlights the bottom of the panel where the floor would sit on top of. That was my issue. See, if I would of installed the floor and riveted it down, and then try to install the cabling and remote controller I was going to have unforeseeable problems. I am glad I didn't install it FIRST! Because I did run into problems trying to install the cables and controller. If I had put the floor in first, I would had to remove it and fix the issues I discovered. I was not about to let that happen!
So here is the first issue I had with the controller. The bolts where to long and preventing the bezel (which holds the control handle) from being flush with my controller panel. So I shortened the bolts by placing them in my vice and hack-sawing them down to the length I needed.
After I got the bolts short and mounted to the bezel I took it over to the panel to see if it would fit. BARELY. First, the controller wouldn't go in from the outside. I had to move the panel outward and place the controller from the inside (this is WHY I didn't install the floor FIRST). The square hole was just a bit to small for the controller to go in from the outside. After I did that, the controller panel still wasn't flush due to the 2" pipe preventing it from being flush. You can kinda see the pipe in the pic, which was causing the problem.
SOOO to fix that issue, all I did was grab my handy dandy torch and heat up the pipe and flatten the area a bit where it was preventing the controller from being flush. I also cut a hole for the throttle cables. I made a mistake though, by making the hole to BIG. I thought I could run my steering cable through it, but didn't realize the steering cable had a big metal shaft on the end (making it impossible to run it through the entire piping. I'll probably just close it up a bit with some duct tape.
