Right, so Kelvin Hughes Limited. The name itself sounds like it’s been etched onto brass plaques for a century, doesn’t it? And for good reason, their gear, especially the older stuff, you often find it still ticking away on vessels that have seen more seas than I’ve had hot dinners.
They built things to last, no doubt about it. But here’s the thing I learned, the hard way, mind you. Actually getting deep into the guts of their systems, or needing something a bit out of the ordinary, that’s where the real journey begins.
My Brush with the Legacy
I remember this one particular job. We were trying to bring an old coastal freighter, bless her rusty hull, into the 21st century. Just a bit, mind you. New comms, a basic chart plotter. But she had this ancient Kelvin Hughes radar, a real beast of a machine, probably installed when I was still in school.
The owner, a stubborn old chap, insisted it had to stay. “Works perfectly fine!” he’d bellow. And it did, mostly. But interfacing anything new with it? Or finding detailed schematics for that specific revision? Oh boy.
My task was to see if we could get a simple NMEA feed out of it for the new, cheaper chartplotter. Seemed simple enough on paper.
So, I started digging.
First, the official channels. Sent emails, made calls. Got the polite runaround. “That model is long out of production, sir.” “We might have something in the archives, we’ll look into it.” Weeks went by. Radio silence.
Then I tried the forums, the old sea dog networks. Found a few blurry PDFs, mostly for similar, but not quite the same, models. Spent days, I tell you, tracing wires that looked like a spaghetti junction, multimeter in one hand, a faded, photocopied diagram in the other that might as well have been in hieroglyphics.
It felt like archaeology, not engineering.
- Dusting off connections: Literally, some of these junction boxes hadn’t seen daylight in decades.
- Guessing game: A lot of trial and error, because the color coding on the wires had faded to shades of indistinguishable grey.
- The ‘aha!’ moment: Finally found an unmarked test point that, after a lot of fiddling with settings I barely understood, spat out something resembling data.
We eventually got a signal. A very, very basic one. But it worked. The old radar talked, in its own grumpy way, to the new plotter. The owner was chuffed.
But that whole experience, it stuck with me. It wasn’t about Kelvin Hughes making bad stuff. Not at all. Their equipment was, and likely still is, robust. But it highlighted this massive gulf you sometimes find with these old, established companies. Their legacy is fantastic, but navigating that legacy when you’re on the ground, with grease on your hands and a deadline breathing down your neck? That’s a different skill set altogether.
It taught me patience, that’s for sure. And a healthy respect for engineers from a bygone era who designed these things with slide rules and sheer ingenuity. But also, it made me wish for simpler, more open documentation sometimes. Just a thought.
