My father and I spent the past few days installing new plywood flooring and carpet on a neighbors pontoon boat. He has been suffering with cancer for many years and he loves fishing on the lake but his boat has been in disarray for a while. Overall, I am happy with how it turned out but one problem we were faced with was that before we got a hold of the boat, he had hired some other guys to do the work, and while they seamed to done a decent job, they just stoped showing up, can not be reached, and never even asked for payment for the work they did. I seriously hope they are ok... If we were there to take the boat apart, things would have been simpler, but instead we had examine a bucket of parts and rely on the boat owners memory of how/where things should go. Nevertheless we got almost everything looking and working great, except for some wiring/electrical issues. generally speaking, I am moderately proficient with electronics but don't have a great deal of experience with trolling motors. When we first arrived on site, the battery side of the wiring was disconnected and nothing was labeled, but luckily the control side of the wiring was still hooked up so I was able to label everything and reinstall everything there exactly as it was before, (assuming the guys working on it previously did not move things around there). Its supposed to have two separate variable speed control knobs each controlling a 12 volt trolling motor powered by two independent 12 volt batteries. So in a way, there should be two independent trolling motor systems, not really connected to or dependent on one another to function? But after hooking it up, battery charger seamed to work as intended. But when we tested the motors, we discovered, one speed knob, turns on both motors, and the second knob, apparently does nothing. I plan to go back over with my multimeter and test some things later but wanted to ask for any advice about what should I be looking for or testing to help trouble shoot this issue? or maybe I'll get lucky and this will be a common issue with a simple fix? personally I would prefer to have one single speed knob for both motors, so long as it is still powered by both batteries and not running both motors via a single battery, which I am not entirely sure how to test. But the owner wants to have dual speed knobs so I need to figure out how to do that. The other issue is the tilt control, which has a knob near the speed controls, with a green, purple, and blue wire leading somewhere under the boat and is very hard to trace down. I believe they may run in to a relay (or two?) The tilt motor itself has a two wire cable running into the battery/electronics compartment and it has been physically cut by the previous guys (no terminal plugs). There are two relays, with 4 wires coming out of each. Only 3 wires are connected and the 4th had been cut and taped off with electrical tape for some reason. Basically all cables are connected, except for 4 total wires, the two form the tilt motor and one from each relay. So before I found out I had a problem with the independent motor controls, I was guessing that the 4 loose wires should be connected to make the tilt work. Would it be a bad idea to just try hooking it up and seeing if it works? If I hook them up back-words, I assume the up tilt and down tilt would be back-words? And then I could just swap them around? Or would this cause other problems that I am foolishly unaware of? OR is it possible that these unconnected relay wires are supposed to be for the independent dual motor controls issue and thats why the speed control knobs are acting weird? What should I be looking for or testing? Any and all advice is welcome and appreciated. I will take some pictures and try to post them when I go back over to test things with my multi meter, but any advice on how/what to test for in my situation would be helpful before I do that. Much thanks to everyone in advance for helping me get my neighbor back on the lake fishing again. Cheers
