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Bertram31.com General Bulletin Board
Re: Test meters
Posted By: Vic Roy In Response To: Test meters (bruce)
Date: Monday, 2 May 2005, at 6:43 p.m.
Bruce, I even understand what you said. I can do electrcity and have always been able to thanks to my Dad who tinkered with it. Anyone can mess with 12VDC, but 120 VAC, like Bruce says, will kill you, especially in a wet enviroment. 240 VAC will usually knock you off the wire vs. 120 that will grab you.
As for meters, my preference is the BK Test Bench 388A, a full function digital meter, waterproof, rubber armored, and has a frequency funtion. Yep, you can check the cycles on your genset with it. Think I paid about 120 for it and it's so far bulletproff, and will pass 20 amps, which is a lot for a hand held meter, but as Bruce says, don't be checking DC amps with a hand meter unless you know what the load is gonna be. AC load is always checked with a clamp over meter that just senses the magnetic field produced by the load wire.
Most electrical problems on boats are caused by sloppy connections or terminals that corrode. One way to stop this is to coat all ring terminals (if you have any spade terminals, change them to solid rings right now) with Penetrox, the conductive grease with powdered copper in it. You can get it any any electrical supply house.
As for crimp-on terminals or butt connectors, forget it. Get some good heat shrink tubing - most electronic supply houses (the commercial ones) sell it for next to nothing vs. Radio Shack or Worst Marine. Strip the wires with one of the new fangled strippers that look like a pair of pliers (avoid the plastic ones, spend $8 and get some good all metal ones), then inspect the conductors, if black or green, scrape them with your pocket knife to shiny copper. Then run some heat shrink of appropriate size on the wire, and twist the wires lengthwise and press down with your wire cutters to get all the 'stick up' strands down. Then solder with rosin core solder using either a hot electric iron, or better yet, one of the new mini-torches. Make sure the solder runs good into the strands and ends up shiny. Then when it cools, coat with Penetrox grease, then slide the heat shrink tubing over the joint and shrink with an elecric heat gun or very carefully with a torch. That joint will last your lifetime. Use the same technique with ring terminals. If the terminals are not heat shrink, cut the plastic off with a knife and go from bare metal, solder, Penetrox, heat shrink. Use Penetrox under all terminal screws too. It's so easy to do it right the first time.
UV
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