Anyone know how to wire a light bar into the boat?

[squirrell]

Anyone know how to wire a light bar into the boat?

[Buergday]

It's pretty simple. First, splice all of the positive wires from the lights together into one main positive wire (if you have more than 4 lights, you might want to run two main positive wires). Do the same for the negatives. Make sure that you are using the proper gauge wire (at least as thick as the wire coming out of the lights), otherwise you may lose power. I would soder & tape all of the conections, so you don't have to worry about your wires being pulled out of wire nuts. Now that you have two "main" wires (one positive & one negative), route both down through your tower, through your gunwale (drill a hole!), and under your dash. Make sure you leave enough slack wire in case you screw up. If you have an extra accessory switch available on the dash the wiring will be all finished for you. Using a 12 volt test light, probe all of the connections on the backside of the switch. One of the connections will only light up when the switch is in the "on" position. This is where you will connect your main positive wire. Now the main negative wire needs to be grounded. Under your dash panel there should be a metal bar. This bar is connected to the negative terminal of your battery, so you can ground the negative wire to it. If you want to be sure that the bar is grounded, just use your 12 volt test light to check it (clip the test light ground to it, and then probe a few live wires behind the dash panel - if it lights up, you're all good). Once your negative wire is grounded, you need to make sure that the fuse running the accessory switch is the right ampage. Locate the corresponding fuse in the fuse box, and switch it out accordingly. There you go - you're all finished!
One cool thing that you can do to make the installation a bit cooler, is to use a trailer wiring harness where the wiring enters the boat (where you drilled the gunwale). Many towers are removable, so the wiring needs to be able to "unplug" too. Purchase a trailer wiring harness at an auto parts store. I bought a nice looking 4-prong chrome deal. The "female" side mounts flush into the gunwale, and holds tight with a couple of screws. It has a little spring-loaded trapdoor that keeps the water out. The "male" side is wired to the two "main" light wires that come out of the tower, with about 6-8 inches of slack (covered in flex tubing). Since the trailer harness has 4 connections, and you've only got 2 lighting wires, you just split each of the two wires in two. Now you have 4 wires to connect to the harness. When you need to take the tower off, you just unplug the lights from the boat. It works great.
If you do not already have an existing accessory switch that you can use in your dash, you'll have to wire up a new switch. That's not hard either. Let me know if you need instructions for that.
Good luck!

[skicrave]

Great guide Buergday, I'll add one more thing though. For anything more than 2 lights you really should use a relay

[Buergday]

Oh yeah - good point. Thanks

[skobi1]

good point on the relay, and on the wire size I would use a larger guage than the pigtails on the lights, try to envision the light wires bundled together to for one wire-- thats the size to use, I used a 10ga for 4 lights through a relay. Oh yeah and the ground wire needs to be of equal or greater size than the hot.