The boat came off the top of a rather large wave, going a little too fast and landed on the up swell of another rather large wave. This abrupt stop snap the monitor against the windshield and broke the back light in the monitor(the windshield was fine). My resourceful dive buddy in telling the story in various places was able to acquire a previously loved marine grade monitor, before the following weekend no less.

In this photo it’s pretty much in its post tuneup splendor. When it came to me the color was entirely wrong, on closer inspection the red was missing. The classic bent pin in the connector wasn’t the issue. End to end continuity testing narrowed the problem to the cable so the connections inside the connector housing were now the prime candidate, and so it was.

This monitor being intended for marine applications it runs on 12 V DC which is connected to the VGA connector to avoid multiple cables.

Here we see it with the connector shell removed, the barrel socket for power is in the foreground.

In this image we get a good look at the questionable soldering, some of its mine, most of it isn’t. At some point in the history of this monitor the connector was replaced with the unit harvested from scrap. You can see the casings has been trimmed with the dremel tool in the connections are electrically adequate (at least they were) but mechanically questionable. It’s more than a little bit ugly but it gets the job done I most likely would’ve done it just the same way, only difference being…

I would’ve cleaned with alcohol and covered the connections with nice blob of hot glue being sure to get it well stuck to the connector housing and the wire insulation in order to mechanically isolate the delicate electrical connections. Now it’s fit for a good size wave.

The monitor also comes with a perfectly serviceable custom-made aluminum bracket, very robust but missing a few details. The monitor slides into it from the bottom it’s a snug fit and although it can’t get out there is actually nothing holding it up, well there is now.

The wooden block fits snugly in the cutout on the back of the monitor. Underneath the block he can see and access panel, this is a watertight gasket and conceals the buttons for horizontal and vertical size and position as well as an enigmatic mode button. To the upper left is another watertight panel which conceals the cable connections inside it is a stripped screw so I backed it up with the handymans secret weapon (in black). Also visible as a black watertight toggle switch in the lower right. Everyone involved assumed this was the power switch however in actual fact the monitor doesn’t have the power switch. The watertight toggle is in fact a day/night switch, it dims the backlight.

The unit came to me without any bolts to hold on the till base. I felt a no tools solution was in order. I used a three-quarter inch 1/4 20 bolt with a small T-bar brazed on to prevented it from spinning, along with a couple washers and a standard hardware store thumb nut. The bracket was sized to use friction washers, there was a few crumbs of the originals left, it resembled a pencil eraser. I replaced them with a circle of innertube rubber.