Every winter the sailing association here in Enschede (D.Z. Euros) starts to repair the damage done to their boats during the sailing season. Fixing the sails, patching up the paintwork and in general repair everything that needs to be fixed.
On one of the boats, Jaffa, our sea going sailboat, we noticed that some of the electronics started failing during the season. Navigational lights started to flicker, instruments just stopped working, and so on.
Since this in no way wanted we decided that this year, the entire electrical system would be overhauled, starting with the switchboard (some of the switches were broken too).
For this project I needed a quick prototype to make a mock-up of how everything was going to be placed on the switchboard and if certain features should be removed or added in comparison to the current one. In order to do this I designed a prototype in Adobe Illustrator and took some measurements of the current switchboard.
Luckily the switchboard had dimensions which would allow it to be laser-cut out of one 30*60cm (h*w) panel.
After some design iterations and discussion I went to the DesignLab to have the panel laser-cut and to see if it would work.
To me this looked pretty nice since it was just half a days work in total, from first concept to a mock-up to see if everything would work out the way we would like.
Some things still needed to be changed from this design, some measurements were off so the panel didn’t sit flush with the rest of the interior and some cutouts were too large or too small.
Since then some adjustments have been made and at the moment the second iteration is being reviewed in order to have it laser-cut.
