Alrighty. I have to share this with somebody.
My wife and I own an old Pearson 323. We love it, it's built like a tank, sails better than a Benehuntalina (I love that word, read it on sailnet for the first time a day or two ago) and has lots of stowage room. Well a while back, the bonding wire to our mast step broke, and the step turned to corroded goo before we realized it. (this is a keel stepped mast) Got our boatyard to custom fab a replacement out of 316 stainless that's truly ridiculous in scope and also addressed the issue of mast corrosion, I can talk about that later if someone's interested, but what I wanted to post was our mast rewiring.
We figured with the mast out, might as well do some work on it, and one thing that needed replacement was the wiring. Previously there was no conduit for the
anchor light and steaming light, we had no spreader
lights. Either the builder or previous owner had simply hung the wires from the masthead, and encased the dangling wires in foam pipe insulation like plumbers use, which would swing back and forth at
anchor and whack the insides of the aluminum spar (kathunk, kathunk, kathunk) all night. Well that was annoying, but not alarming, until the breaker for the
anchor light started tripping, ostensibly because the spreader bolts had worn through the pipe foam and the wire's insulation. Whole thing's gotta come out, and while we're at it, might as well hang some spreader
lights, and while we're at
that, might as well try and get some kind of conduit up the mast to keep the same problems from happening in the future.
So we bust out the old Calder everything-in-the-world-about-boat-repair book, and he says to get some pvc pipe conduit, run a bead of adhesive down one side, lay it inside the mast, then spin it 180 degrees so the adhesive sticks. We were pretty skeptical about that, for a couple reasons. One, we weren't so sure we'd get it right and didn't want a bunch of additional crap stuck to the inside of our spar if we goofed it up. Two, more importantly, we were worried the conduit might come unglued in the future, and produce even more racket. We preferred a simpler, cheaper, quieter solution that was more easily reversed. And my wife comes up with the idea of Funduit.
We go to the dollar store and buy a whole box of those "Fun Noodle" things - you know, the colored kids float toys for the pool with the hole down the middle. Got the whole box for maybe twenty bucks. Well those things are made out of closed cell urethane foam - same as the "tundra" version of plumber's pipe insulation - but they're two or three times as thick, and they're pretty darn resistant to environmental degradation. We take them back to the boatyard, and string all our wires through them, using the central hole as the conduit, like a giant foam snake. Then put a wrap of duct tape at each of the joints between the Fun Noodle sections to hold it all together. Like this:
We made two. A red one to go the whole length of the mast and carry the
anchor light wiring and a bundle wire for any instrumentation we want to add in the future (we're not big on instrumentation, honestly) and a blue one to go to the spreaders for our steaming light and our new spreader
lights. (we used forklift headlights for the spreader
lights, actually, with hose clamps, but held them off the aluminum spreaders with plastic tube to prevent corrosion at the metal interface) Then we just shoved the two Funduits into the mast. Like this:
When we stepped the mast again, the Funduits settled a little, but they're so big they don't swing. And the added bonus is they're actually sound
absorbent, so when a halyard goes banging against the mast at night, they deaden the sound some for folks below decks.
So there you have it. Funduit. Clearly not a super technical solution for modern boats, with their internally extruded conduits and in-mast
furling and crap, but a neat cheap solution for older boats, in my opinion.
Tayana 52 Ketch
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