V20 Hull Construction

[76GMC1500]

The products by Blue Sea Systems can make even the most novice of wiring jobs look great. *Bundle up your wires and throw on some cable loops and you've got a professional looking job. *The other thing to do is to cut your wires to the right length, looping up the excess never looks good. *Following the lines and corners of the cabin also helps. *Terminal and bus bars also improve the look of wires where many circuits come into one or where wires need to have removable connections. *That thing on the left with all of the loops is a terminal bar turned bus bar for the nav lights. *Bus bars cost about 2x as much as a terminal bar, so I just connected each terminal on the bar with the loops to make it a bus. *Then, I attached one nav light to each one of the bars. *It looks a whole lot better than trying to gang all of the nav lights together onto one switch *or just twisting all of the wires together.

The Seabirds were famous for their cored hull. *It makes them light and sturdy. *The hull on mine is over 1" thick with 1/4" glass on the bottom, 5/8th" of core, and another 1/4" of glass on top. *The sides are 1/4" glass, 1/2" core, and about 3/16" glass again. *Even the console is balsa cored. *It kind of makes it a pain to install guages because it is over 1" thick as well.

They are also famous for rot and delamination of the core just like all other balsa cored boats. This one seems to be ok. I drilled a few exploratory holes in the boat. There was water up to a few inches from the keel from a sketchy repair, but no rot or delamination. I drained the water out and sealed it up.

[ebol5]

There is no foam in my 73 cuddy. I had it opened up for new stringers and transom back in 89. I will post pic's.. no, really, I will.. as soon as I find them. I have a million pic's to post from my 21 (almost) years of owning the High Dive. I may have some questions about setting up a gallery. I will see when I go in there.