Boat Gauge Replacement Guide
Boat Gauge Replacement Guide – Video Transcript
Hi, welcome to the Sierra boat shop. Today we're going to be talking about instrumentation. We're going to be working on a 1988 hydra sport and as you can see from our last close-up the dashboard is a rather unique array of old instruments that are rather weather-beaten from the elements, sun, rain, winter elements. We're going to be taking a look at swapping those out and what's involved.
This is rather an easy switch, what we're going to be working with today is a wide array of Teleflex gauges, Teleflex manufacturers gauges for outboard engines and stern drives. We're going to be working with everything from speedometers, tachometers, water pressure and showing you just exactly what's involved in putting those instrumentations in the dash.
Tools that you'll require to use is most likely just a standard quarter inch drive socket, either a 5/16 or 3/8 socket head, a pair of wire strippers, a nice set of terminal ends and most likely some zip ties. Now to get this started we would locate the bracketry under the back of the instrument. Okay we're going to take our ratchet, we're going to find the nuts and locate them on the back bracket. We're going to loosen them normally we'll be able to twist the rest of the balance of them off with our hands. Come in and remove both of them, we'll set those aside, come back in and grab the bracket. The bracket is just a normal "U" shaped type of metal bracket, normally stamped steel, and all of these clamp brackets and related hardware will come with the new instruments.
We're going to remove the instrument from the dash panel and try and get a good shot of the back of this instrument. You'll see that this used spade terminals, these are the older-style normally found on older boats and we will be using a newer style gauge that has ring terminals so we're going to quickly change the spade terminals for ring terminals and replace this gauge. We'll attach the ground wire first and then work our way around to the wires for the lights and then the wire for the sensor. After we get all wires terminated to the respective positions we're going to put the gauge back in its slot and put the clamp bracket on and tighten it up.
We'll continue on with each gauge. we simply put the gauge into the dash panel locate our clamp bracket on the back, make sure the gauge is centered, put on our 5/16 brass locking nut, tighten it down, take our ratchet, give it a few turns and we have the gauge installed. We'll just continue that throughout the process and we'll be right back and you'll see a new dash panel.
As you can see there's a world of difference between what we took out and what we replaced in the dash. Teleflex makes a fine complement of different gauges for any type of boating situation.