Lackey Sailing | Calliope Girl 14

November 15, 2023

Calliope Girl 14

Wednesday

To begin, I quickly installed the battery charger on the new mounting panel, along with the terminal block for the existing refrigerator circuit, as this location would work for the new refrigerator wiring as well. All the existing wiring to the charger worked in the new location, except the negative cable, which was now too short (along with the negative cable leading to the inverter. (The inverter positive lead was still connected to the main battery switch panel I’d removed earlier.)

There seemed no time like the present to go ahead and make up new lengths of cable for these two positions, so I disconnected the old ones and prepared new ones of the lengths needed. For the inverter, I could repurpose part of a long length of cable that I’d removed from the starboard battery bank, as that particular cable wouldn’t be re-used in its current format, and for the battery charger, I used new #2AWG yellow cable, which was slightly larger than the original #4, but was what I had on hand.

With that, I could straighten up the wire bundles in the space and move on to the galley.

In the galley, my immediate goal was to remove anything that was secured to the underside of the countertop and other structures. I clipped wire ties and removed whatever fixtures necessary to accomplish this.

At least for now, I planned to leave a complicated little corner of the existing upper galley cabinets alone; this small locker included several gauges, terminal blocks and buss bars, and a battery switch panel with several heavy cables. Relocating this would be time-consuming and difficult, so I planned to leave it be and figure out how to incorporate it into the new work as I went. To release the nearby panels from the corner required a couple small cuts, in both the face panel and the countertop. After that, I removed the upper cabinets in the galley with little effort.

I had to make a couple relief cuts in the countertop to free some wiring that ran through drilled holes, and afterwards I removed the countertop in several pieces to keep it easy to handle. I removed the staving from both sides of the galley bulkhead, largely intact, and then I removed what remained of the cabinetry.

I removed the sections of cabin sole that ran up the curve of the hull on each side, which would improve access to the settees for their removal. These sections mostly came out with ease, except for a short section on the forward port side, which was a later addition (presumably when the engine room was moved), and was very well adhered with what appeared to be 5200. So for now I left this section alone; I’d remove it later, when I had better access to chip it out bit by bit.