Replacing Raytheon RL70 with Garmin 4010

[Pakmule]

Yesterday I started the project of pulling the Raytheon RL70 from my 2000 310.

The first part was to pull the wiring harness which went fairly smoothly except the part where I put my multimeter on two wires to see if they were hot and promptly blew a 3.5 amp fuse in the foldout breaker box under the steering wheel.

Pulling out the unit itself was pretty straightforward as it just had a knurled knob at each corner. After pulling it out I had a big hole in my dash that is not even remotely big enough to hold the new Garmin unit

As the Garmin unit is much larger than the Raytheon I decided that I was going to end up cutting so much of the padded dash cover that it would probably just fall apart or be extremely difficult to stabilize. I am not a big fan of it anyway so I went ahead and completely removed it with the idea of laying something else down in it's place. Here is what I am left with after I removed the padded cover. Not pretty.

Here is the dash cover itself. I need to find something to replace it with that is sturdy enough to hold the GPS unit, stereo control, radio and depth finder readout.

Any suggestions? I was thinking a piece of matching fiberglass or if I could find it, a piece of fiberglass that matches the other fake wood.

I will post more as I make headway.

 

[Go Aweigh2452]

Contact SomeSailor @ gmail.com He has done a lot of dashes for people and his prices are great. He's on the IboatNW and BOC sites. At least look at his workmanship... He has some great tooling just for this stuff.

Yesterday I started the project of pulling the Raytheon RL70 from my 2000 310.

The first part was to pull the wiring harness which went fairly smoothly except the part where I put my multimeter on two wires to see if they were hot and promptly blew a 3.5 amp fuse in the foldout breaker box under the steering wheel.

Pulling out the unit itself was pretty straightforward as it just had a knurled knob at each corner. After pulling it out I had a big hole in my dash that is not even remotely big enough to hold the new Garmin unit

As the Garmin unit is much larger than the Raytheon I decided that I was going to end up cutting so much of the padded dash cover that it would probably just fall apart or be extremely difficult to stabilize. I am not a big fan of it anyway so I went ahead and completely removed it with the idea of laying something else down in it's place. Here is what I am left with after I removed the padded cover. Not pretty.

Here is the dash cover itself. I need to find something to replace it with that is sturdy enough to hold the GPS unit, stereo control, radio and depth finder readout.

Any suggestions? I was thinking a piece of matching fiberglass or if I could find it, a piece of fiberglass that matches the other fake wood.

I will post more as I make headway.

 

[Pakmule]

Thanks, I'll send an email.

 

[Nehalennia]

Thanks, I'll send an email.

I'll second Doug. He, Mike(SomeSailor) does great work.

Best of luck. Also, replace the VHF with a DSC model while you're at it. Looks like a RayMarine 210 like the one I just removed. I replaced it with a Standard Horizon GX1500S and it works great and hooked properly to your new Garmin will place icons of your friends boats when you share MMSI #'s

 

[CSR_Admin]

Check out this guy Scott at Vector Imaging. He makes stuff for people that r eally want a custom look, he makes a lot of OEM stuff too for some custom boatbuilders in the NE. Whenever we have the time to have a really first class panel made we will use him. http://www.vectorled.com/marine.htm

http://www.vectorled.com

 

[Pakmule]

So I made some more headway without pitcures. I replaced the current Raytheon GPS with the Garmin GPS17x and managed to pull the cable from the top of the radar arch to the dash. This was a two hour affair as the current GPS cable had two connectors that were catching on bulkheads.

As a result of having to pull nearly everything off the starboard side of the boat to pull the cable I learned that the speakers in the radar arch were completely blown. the cones literally fell out in a cloud of plastic bits when I pulled off the speaker covers so that is the next project.

I ran a quick power connection to the 4010 and quickly learned that NMEA 2000 networking was like stepping back in time complete with network terminators and power injectors. Anyhow, I got the 4010 up and running while sitting on the dash and all is well. The next step is to take the saw to the dash.

Sorry for no pics this time. I forgot my camera today. More updates tomorrow.

 

[RonF]

Kurt,

Great post for us 310 owners, thanks. I'm eager for the rest of the story.

Last year I was not up for that much work, so I put my Garmin 3206 on a modified bracket where the factory installed Ray unit was.

 

[Pakmule]

More detail on pulling the cable from the arch. The first issue was the transition from the arch to the hull. The cables went into a piece of conduit at this point and the hole was waterproofed with a big blog of rubber stuff. That is easy to get to if you simply pull off the pad at the base of the arch. Next I pulled out the cup holder assembly that is near the driver's knee. It came right off with five screws and gave me access to the miles of cable and wiring that goes from the bow to the stern. After that it was a piece of cake to pull the new GPS wire all the way up to the dash. The whole process was probably 90 minutes

As a side note I found my next project while I was doing this as I pulled off the cover to one of the speakers and a shower of plastic bits fell out. They used to be the polymer cone on my speaker. All four of them were like that...

Today was reciprocating saw day. You know you are doing a fun project when you get to go buy a new piece of Dewalt equipment. I placed the Garmin cutout sticker where I wanted the new device to go, cut out the center of the sticker where the old hole was and had at it. I followed the cut line on the sticker very closely and then had to go another 30 minutes of slightly massaging the hole as the bale mount knurling (if that is the right word) stuck out a bit and it was stopping the unit from sliding in. I ended up having to cut ear holes for that.

After that the unit juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust barely fit with a little convincing so I called it a day. I slid the unit in and began the networking job. That was pretty straightforward as I just had to run power to the unit and the network, attach a whole bunch of doodads together and voila! No gps... I played with cables for about five minutes and finally the 4010 saw the gps and all was well. I am not sure if I rattled something and it started working or if NMEA2000 really is that slow in identifying new devices.

Anyhow, here is how it looked after it was installed. I didn't have time to take pictures of the cabling. I will do that this week. The wife arrived and was unhappy with the cloud of dust that was settling all over the boat so I had to clean up so that we could go out and brave the weather.

I have been trading emails with SomeSailor and I am going to send him my padded dash. He is going to take a piece of ABS, cut it the same size and put some faux burled wood on top of it. I will then lay that down where the padded dash is. That should make it look pretty nice.

 

[Four Suns]

I've used Scott at Vector Imaging and I'll give a few opinions here (I'm never short of opinions).

First I would say that he does nice work and is very responsive and fairly priced. Gotta like that.

When I added my bridge PC, I wanted a factory look on one of the panels on the helm. I had 3 open switch slots on this one panel but they were labeled for Cat engine stuff so they were not used with my Cummins. This is the panel I had him make:

Note the 3 switches on the left middle row for the Computer/Master/Network/CPU. Looks very nice.

I have not installed that and here's the reason. The burlwood does not match well enough IMO and is more of a brown than the reddish color Sea Ray used on my boat. Trying to match the wood color was a mistake (not Scott's but mine) and I should have just went with a black/silver/gray/brushed metal or some other color that complimented the helm instead.

The other issue is this... and it's big... The panels that Sea Ray uses appear to be molded and not cut from sheet stock. The edges for the panels have a quarter round smooth edge. The panels that are cut from sheet stock from Vector Imaging look like this:

Note the white material layer and then the plastic wood layer. This edge is square and not rounded and I think it jumps out at you when it is sitting next to the OEM panels from Sea Ray. This image is from Scott's web site:

You can see the molded shapes around the instruments compared to the panel he made.

My point is not to use him as he does nice work. But I think you really need to think the material that you use so the color matching and edge issues look like they fit in and are not an "add on" or replacement.

My 2 cents.

I am going to have him do some more work for me so I can clean up my AV install and a few other panels...

 

[Pakmule]

Even with the two factory panels that already exist on my 310 there is a wide difference. The forward dash with all the gauges does not match the color of the panel with the rocker switches. The gauge panel is much lighter and is molded while the rocker panel is dark and has squared edges like the one you are holding in the picture.

I wired the new GPS right where the old GPS was so no need for an extra switch. Actually I have a question there. I soldered the network power wire to the GPX power wire and wired them into the same connector. Given the size of the network power connector it looked like it drew very little power. Should I wire that separately? Everything seems to be working like a champ at this point.

 

[Four Suns]

I'm not one for having solder connections for wires on the boat. I like to have the right wire length going to the switch or a terminal block/box. If I need two wires on a switch, I use piggyback connectors like this:

One of the connections crimps to the wire and an extra spade is piggybacked for a second wire.

If I have more than two wires going to a circuit/switch, I'll use a terminal block to fan out the connections and have a single wire going to the switch.

There are guidelines about 12v wire size and length for the amperage you need as well as voltage drop you'll see and you should follow those as well.