so, reading through the other post regarding the hardin marine wiring harnesses, i must say that looks pretty sexy.. but, if i were to tackle this myself - any major things i should keep an eye on?

none of my damn guages work right, haha. except maybe water temp, and sometimes oil pressure. 

also looking at running a fairly fat power  and ground to the front, then breaking it off on a junction box, am i absolutely retarded for thinking this way?. give me some input before i go insane.


thanks

Yep, thinking of running a 4 ga power / 0 or 1 ga ground to the front, fused from the battery, split off on a distribution block, and powering the ignition, then having the key on power the guages. my thinking is for power, but also later adding an amp for the speakers off one run.

really trying to cut down on the amount of wires that run from the front of the boat, to the back as it's a giant mess right now.

I built my harness from scratch using McMaster-Carr wiring and connectors. I used the standard marine color scheme for the wires. I got the fuse panel at West Marine. Here are some shots of it.
T.J.

Don't series your gauges, parallel them to the power source.

Why? Been doing the series thing for twenty years, not enough load for a voltage drop.. Just curious.


GT

What ??

 How would a gauge give an acurate reading if its wired in series ?   Electric gauges read resistance to ground from the sending unit, right ?  So, if the gauges power is in series it would be reading the resistance of the sending unit and the resistance of the other gauges.  Plus if one gauge goes bad wount all the gauges stop working (like those damn Christmas lights). 

I think we are talking about the grounds and power wires (black/purple) being wired in a daisy chain, gauges use a very small amount of current (like 20ma), if your using 14 gauge wire your good for like 15-20 amps, the last 10 project boats we have done all have the gauges in series (daisy chain), never ever had any issues....Now if you actually do a series with a pos. to neg. deal, not only would it not work at all, but would probably start a pretty good fire because of all of the voltage drop....

Hopefully I did not misunderstand...Like my wife says I always do.

I'm sitting here thinking about how funny it would be to have your gauges blinking when you wiggle them

GT

OK, just to clear this up. 

 Parallel is (daisy chain),  Positive to positive to positive, and neg to neg to neg  = the right way. 

 Series wound be + of first gauge is power - of first gauge is jumped to + of second gauge, - of second gauge is jumped to + of third gauge, - of third gauge is connected to ground = wrong

 And GT is right ,  no need to run individual wires for each gauge.  Just jump from gauge to gauge with good wire and connectors.

That is the way I did mine and have done them to other boats. No problem for years.
  T.J.