Re: PICTON / GENERAL WIRING QUESTION
OK, let's start at the start.<br /><br />First off when you post a question like this you need to give all of the information that could possibly be relevent. In this case just the type of motor it has would have been nice, make and model would have helped even more.<br /><br />With that as a bit of background I am going to assume its an outboard of some sort. You said t hat the rev counter (tachometer) isn't working and if that is the case the first thing you want to check is to see if its got alternator output (battery charging). The reason is that for most outboards the charging circuit and the tachmeter are intimately related and if you loose the tach it is a pretty good sign that you've also lost what is usually refered to as the outboard's alternator - though in the automotive sense it doesn't have one.<br /><br />The tilt, if it is an outboard could be dead electrically, which would be an easy fix, or it could be dead mechanically, which can be an expensive fix. If its electrical you simply break out the test light and follow the wire all the way from the tilt switch to the hydraulic pump and somewhere along the line you'll find the problem. That problem will probably be in the form of a broken, corroded, or disconnected wire. Easy to fix. On the other hand if you get all the way to the tilt/trim unit and the power is good then its time to break out the old checkbook.<br /><br />Next the gas (petrol) guage. This one is the height of simplicity. In your fuel tank there is a thing called a sender. It is simply just an arm that hangs in the tank with a float on one end and a variable resistor on the other end. As the float goes up the resistance goes either up or down (I can never remember which way it goes) and then that resistance is relayed to the guage by a pair of wires, one of which should be pink and the other black. The guage itself is simply an ohmmeter with F on one side and E on the other side of the guage. Now, here is the deal on them. The senders almost never go bad. The wires between the guage and the sender go bad all the time, and its usually the black wire and its usually at the end where it attaches to the tank. Guages themselves go bad frequently, and they are inexpensive to replace.<br /><br />As for the question about a standard wireing set up, well, sort of but not really. Its a small boat so in fact there aren't a hell of a lot of different way to wire it, but at the same time there is no 'standard wireing set up'. There are some codes but I guess by the differences between my language and yours that the American Yacht Association's codes are not particularly germain to you. Don't let that bother you though. Its a small boat and I doubt that it has an extremely complicated wireing system. You could probably rewire the boat end to end in less than a day and for very little expense. <br /><br />Thom
