Richard.C
Active member
I've been a bit slow, sorry! There will be more news in a few weeks. Sea trials are underway (they do more than one) and everything is going well. Some detailed parts of the build are still being finished. I'm flying down next week and will be on board Thursday/Friday, and I'll get some pictures then. Delivery to me is scheduled for a couple of weeks later (mid April) but could slip a bit.
Meantime here are a few pics of the Williams tender mods that have been going on. It's a Sportjet 435, with the bigger 130hp engine and all the useful options, in exactly the same orca/teak deck/ silvertex as the Ribeye so they will be a matching pair. I like the boat very much having had one on charter last summer, but I'm not loving Williams themselves. They have made the tubes in the wrong colour so the tubes have to be changed, when the correct ones arrive, which is delaying the lorry taking it to Italy. Also Williams are a big waste of time if you want any customisation: they will say "maybe" to customisation requests, but then after months they said a flat "no" which left me with less time than I should have had to find an alternative solution. Painful.
Picture below is supposed to be a render of mine, though the teak is the wrong colour and the beige gelcoat and tubes should be cold white (with grey as shown in the render). So as well as not building the actual tubes in the correct colour, the rendered tubes are wrong too - at least they are consistent. The orange seats are correct, at least.
I want a MFD with all the usual features including linked VHF, proper echo sounder using bronze transducer, etc. Alas Williams can't/won't do this in any acceptable way on the 435 - below pics show their MFD option which is absolutely hideous. Exposed wiring and a horrible "mount on a pole" concept, urgh. I can scarcely believe this is the best they can do in 2024 on a £70k boat.
So Alan at Essex Boatyards premises, who is an great guy and can work plenty of magic with GRP, kindly undertook a dashboard mod for me. First they had to strip the dash down to get to the bare GRP moulding, then Alan made a wooden plug as shown below. This is all to my design - I wanted the MFD sticking out sideways in a pod, so leaving the step's full surface below still accessible to feet as you step onto the boat. The teak isn't a seat, it's only a step - see render above. First few pics are the original dash close up. This is another boat, not mine, also with the Williams plotter option fitted, and also showing the horrible Carling switches that I also wanted to get rid of:
The picture below shows the wooden plug that Alan made:
Next below are various pictures of work in progress. The VHF aerial is concealed inside the helm unit, and will work fine because GRP is pretty transparent to VHF. Tom Pringle at Boats.co.uk did all the assembly and wiring very professionally:
Finally the pics below show finished job. GRP work is perfect. The pod is very strong so wouldn't break even if you stood on it. VHF antenna is hidden as above. VHF curly wire disappears into a round brush seal. Dimensions are nice and tight so the pod is barely bigger than the MFD (a 7 inch Garmin) and the step is only interrupted to the tune of 3 planks worth of teak so works perfectly well for stepping into the boat. As ever Essex Boatyards / Boats.co.uk and their great (on site but independent) Alan came up with the goods again
I need to sort out labelling for the two new halo switches (deck moodlights and Lumishore underwater lights) but that will be easy enough when I get round to it.
You might want to do a little VHF test, with the antenna so close to other electronics it's best to ensure you don't get interference when transmitting. It can be difficult to diagnose but concentrated RF energy can cause weird issues.
