Best place to mount grounding Bar

[tryme]

Ok i am going to ground all my gauges to a grounding bar and run that bat with an 8 gauge wire to my battery.  should i also ground the MDC?  where is the best place to mount the grounding bar?

[sailtl]

Yes you should ground the MDC also. I would locate the grounding bar in the foot well of the drivers seat close to the MDC.

[tryme]

right to the wall?

[cyclone]

If it's  a D drive, I'd mount it under the dash on the left side in back. The chaseway from the bilge (and battery) comes up slightly forward of and beneath it. It's a straight wire run, take a look and you'll see what I mean, remove the kick panel. You can mount it to the back wall with a couple of #8 screws, drill a pilot hole that's dang close to that size. If its a V drive, then run the wires from the batt via the starboard gunwale chase tubes. I put my buss bar high on the gunwale under the deck joint.  In that case, I liquid nailed a small piece of MDF to the bare hull, then screwed the buss bar to it.  It's above my right knee when driving, if that helps.

Either way, you run ground/power pigtails to the  other components requiring power. You should use inline fuses from the bus bar to each device.

[tryme]

What size and type of fuses should i use?

[cyclone]

I say that as general advice when wiring power to a device. It depends what you are doing with your boat. On mine, I powered the stereo head unit from my aux power buss that I installed. From the buss bar to the head unit, there is an inline fuse. I think its three amps, whatever came with the head unit.  The fuse should be close to the buss bar.

At the battery, there's  a maxifuse that I use to power the buss. It is 30 amp. I made up a harness of 8 gauge red and black wire with a fuse holder attached, that I hooked right to the battery switch. I ran the harness up the starboard gunwale and attached it to the aforementioned dual buss bar. It is hot any time the battery switch is turned on. All my aux devices are powered from this dual buss bar. I put an automotive relay linked to the buss bar that is switched by the purple wire from the ignition switch. This relay supplies a single buss bar that I power stuff that needs to be ignition switched (i.e. Perfect Pass, depth finder)

[Rambling Wreck]

Whooossshhh - that was the relevant info flying right over my head. Sorry, Pete, but it would need to be at a 3rd grade level for me to understand. What we need is a round up. I will crawl under your dash and look!

[lesman01]

Yes. I'll need to take the short buss.