Much thought went into the placement of items in the engine bay. Routing the exhaust was one major problem as the original exhaust in the Jet Ski went front wards before looping back on itself.
Here you can see that I was able to route it backwards towards to left hand back corner and then forwards to the muffler and then out to the exhaust outlet. Worked pretty well considering and I did not have to cut and shut any of the original parts. I would have been in real trouble if the boat was not as wide as it is!
Here is another shot from another angle. This also shows the mounts for the fuel tank. Initially I was to have to fuel tank in the bow but this nice stainless one ended up being in the stern. It took ages to find the right tank that would fit under the deck. It would have been nice to have a deck filler but this was not possible with the tank in the engine bay as it was too high.
The original pine dashboard, shown in earlier pages, was given the heave and a new Tassie Oak one constructed. It took a bit of fiddling to work out the angles of the sides of the dashboard but it worked out pretty well in the end. My one regret is that I did not plug the screw holes – I simply filled them with some left over thickened epoxy.
Here it is in the boat with the gauges and wiring in place.
And here is all the wiring at the back.
I was amazed at the amount of wiring that ended up being in such a small boat! The gauges had lights in them so I had to put another switch in to run them! Note the steering here. It’s a Morse helm designed especially for jet boats. A wooden wheel would have been nice but the budget didn’t stretch to three times the price of the plastic one.
With the engine wiring I changed the way things worked considerably. The original Jet Ski had start and stop buttons on the handle bars. This just was not going to work in a boat. All users would expect there to be a key to turn things on and off – like a car. I eventually used a key along with an automotive relay to control the motor starting and stopping. I wired the normally closed contacts of the relay to the kill switch. When the key is turned on the relay engages and the kill switch is opened allowing the engine to start once the key is turned to start. When the key is turned off the relay drops out and the kill switch closes and the engine stops.