OK. Best laid plans of mice and men... I got almost nothing done that I planned to get done last night because my test run of my guages was...well...not a complete success. A few minor things, such as the tach harness was partially unplugged when it was tie-strapped in the gunwale, which disconnected the ground to my instrument lights. I finally figured that out but will need to drop the wire bundle from the gunwale so that I can tape the tach harness plug to keep it from coming undone in bumpy water. The temperature guage tested fine and works. Same with the water pressure guage (just blow into the line at the motor), volts guage, and fuel guage (FYI - you can test a fuel guage by hooking up the sender and tank ground and then slowly turning the (empty) fuel tank upside down). It will run the needle from empty to full. The water temp guage can be tested by simply turning it on and seeing it go from dead pinned to ambient temperature on the guage. Volts - well, if you can't figure that one out you should hire someone to wire your stuff up... :lol: The smartcraft guage works and prompts you to do the setup for the motor, which is all in the manual. Here is where I had trouble. Any help from you guys would be much appreciated, as I am waiting in line for help from Faria. My depth sounder turns on and blinks "0.0" ft, on and off. The manual says that this is what it will do of the transducer cable is unplugged. If I unplug the 3 wire transducer cable, it does indeed not change anything - just continues to be the blinking zeros. If you've installed one of these, you know that they give you the transducer with the cable already attached and they give you the plug for the instrument with a short pigtail lead. This way, you can route the wire for the transducer through the transom, etc. and connect it to the pigtail. It is a simple connection - 3 wires, blue, black and bare ground wire. I removed the shrink wrap from the connections and verified that they were connected. I still get blinking zeros. Any ideas? My other problem is that my trim guage does not work. It is a Faria guage designed for Mercury engines. It reads full up trim whether it is powered on or not. I re-checked the wiring diagram for the engine and there is no question that the brown and white wire from the tach harness is the trim sender wire. The dealer says this is an anlog signal, as is everything coming off the tach harness. Looks like a need a different sender on the engine. If so, I wonder if this will result in a loss of the trim indication on the Smartcraft guage. If so - I don't care because I'd rather have the trim indicated on the easier-to-read analog guage. Any ideas on this one, folks??? Finally, I note that I can't test the tach because I can't run the engine until the dealer sets it up. Also, I think the Faria manual says one think about the pole setting and the Merc. engine installation manual says something different. So I'm not sure what pole setting to dial in on the back of the tach. Does anyone know (2006 Optimax 225) the pole setting? One more question - Each time I turn the key to run tests on the guages you can hear the fuel pump and/or oil pump run for about 5 seconds. Since there is no fuel loaded and only the oil in the engine mounted tank, will it hurt the pump(s) to have them run like that when I turn the key? Thanks for any help anyone can provide! MarkBano
Slide a bucket of water up under the depth transducer and see if it reads anything. Mine had to be programmed also. jim
Good idea. It wouldn't occur to me that it matters if it is in water but maybe it does. The directions say that it should read the depth immediately when turned on. There are functions for shallow mode, alarm, unit of measurement, and the like. There is no programming required, per se.
I just tried it and it goes through a little test cycle and some symbols appear, then it goes blank. jim
Mark, It should work just fine once you put it in the water. Mine was the same way when I connected up all of my gauges. Don't go tearing everything apart until after you test it on the river. Greg
I've managed to answer all of my questions today, with some phone calls, internet research and help from you guys. I'm posting it in some detail so it is here if someone else needs the information. Faria tells me that the depth gauge will blink zeros if it is not in the water. The directions say that blinking means the wires are hooked up wrong. It doesn't say anything about blinking if the transducer isn't in the water. I feel like an idiot - but I was just reading the directions (incidentally, I note that some other brands specifically advise the installer in the directions I looked at - .pdf on the net - that the gauge will malfunction if it is turned on when it is not in the water). The folks at Faria are very responsive but their directions are lacking in this area. If it tells you that blinking signals a wiring error then you are going to assume that is what you've got, right? Faria advises that you can test the trim gauge by turning it on (12V DC power up), then use a short lead to connect the signal post with the ground post. This essentially results in a full ground, and it will then read full down (the gauge reads full "up" at rest, w/ no power). Faria suspected that I have the wrong trim sender on the motor - even though the gauge says it is for 2001 and new Mercury engines. I then called the folks at Mercury (who are very helpful) and they told me that the Ditigal Optimax DFI engines have a digital trim sender which sends a signal to the Smartcraft instruments. The tach harness includes a brown and white trim sender lead but it is "dead" unless you hook up an analog trim sender at the engine. I asked the Merc representative why the engine does not come with both a digital sender and an anolog sender (after all ... the engine comes with both digital and analog outputs for temperature and tach). He said that there just isn't room to put two senders on every engine. I don't know about that... Might be a cost issue. I then spoke with someone at the local marine dealer who said that nearly all the boat manufacturers sell their boats with analog trim gauges. Apparently, some people don't care for the digital trim indicator on the Smartcraft system because it is perhaps a bit harder to see at a glance. Accordingly, the dealer told me that they replace the digital senders with analog senders on most of the Optimax engines that they install. He said he's got "piles" of digital senders... So that answers the trim sender question. I've got the new part on order (Quicksilver Part No. 821180 A6 - port mounted - in case anyone cares). If you are trying to find this part it can be confusing because most listings will say "not for Optimax DFI engines." In fact, it does fit those engines and can be used for analog applications. This is clarified on the trim sender application charts which are available on Mercury Parts Express online. I hope this helps. The newer V6 Mercs have 12 pole output for the tach, so you divide this number by 2 to determine the setting on the tach. In this case it would be 6. However, in different places on the internet, I've seen different setting recommendations. Faria's help documents say to use either 4 or 6P. The Mercury representative said to use a setting of "5" on the tach dial. I'll have to go back up under there and see what settings are available. Some of you might understand better than me why you can use more than one setting and get it to work. The last issue has to do with the fuel pump running dry at start up for 5 seconds. The dealer says that this shouldn't hurt it. I posted all of this in case someone else is looking for help on any of these issues in the future. By the way, for those of you who don't know this, the "search" feature on this forum is useful if you are looking for threads that touch on subjects that are of interest to you. We've covered a lot of stuff here and I've used this function to go back into old discussions to get information that I know was discussed previously but which wasn't relevant to me at the time. I'd like to put information together at some point in a more useful form so we can have a link but I'm not sure yet how that would work. There is a lot of stuff - like vendors of products for Hydrodyne restoration - that would be good to have in a single place. I will be talking to the administrators at some point about setting this up. MarkBano
Mark, I can add a page to the restoration section with anything that you would want to add. Just let me know and send me the info. This should help people find restoration info much more efficiently. Daniel
