Dashboard Gauge Replacement for Your Nautique:
Years 2003 - 2009
Starting in the year 2003, Nautique decided to try using Faria gateways to control their new digital dash gauges for the first time. This was an exciting new feature, and showed that Nautique was striving to be on the cutting edge of technology. These 5" gauges appeared analog (meaning that they had needles that pointed to indications on dials like regular analog gauges), but they are actually digital gauges, controlled by electronic stepper motors inside the gauges. These gauges also had small LCD screens at the bottom that provided additional information. This whole system was controlled by a gateway box, usually mounted at the back of the boat.
Unfortunately, over time, most of these gateways have failed. There are no longer any replacement gateways available from Faria or Nautique. There are several reasons for these failures, depending on the version of the gateway box. The early versions (2003 - 2005) actually still used speedometer pitot tubes, and those tubes were directly-connected to the circuit board in the digital electronic gateway box itself! You probably can imagine what sort of issues that caused. Over time, the rubber pitot tube hoses would deteriorate, and that would allow WATER from the pitot tube lines to enter the sealed digital electronic gateway box. Since the units are sealed, there is no way for this water to drain, so it sits in the gateway and destroys the electronics. What a horrible design!! Later gateway designs (2006 - 2009) were a bit better. They used paddlewheels for speed indication, and only wires entered the sealed electronic gateway box. While failures of these later gateways are significantly less frequent than the earlier version, they do still fail for various reasons.
Symptons of Faria Gateway Failure:
-
Erratic fluctuation of indicator needles
-
Some or all gauges become non-functional
-
Gauge lights fail to work
-
LCD panels in gauges stop working
The only solution available to restore functionality of dashboard gauges for these boats is what is known as a Gateway Bypass. This eliminates the digital signal created by the gateway boxes, and uses the tried and true real sensor data from the engine sensors themselves. A gateway bypass requires a new wiring harness to be run from the location of the gateway up to the dashboard, and the gauges must also be replaced (since the old gauges are only able to understand the digital signal that was sent from the old gateway).
Nautique offers a conversion kit for this purpose, and we can install that kit into your boat at our facility. There are a couple things to keep in mind though. This kit is in very high demand, due to the number of failures these gateways are experiencing. Obtaining this kit from Nautique sometimes takes a long time, just because they can't build them fast enough to keep up with the failures of the old gateways. There is often a waiting list to obtain one of these kits, and the wait can sometimes be MONTHS.
Here's our process:
-
You deliver your boat to our facility
-
We remove the dashboard, gateway, and wiring.
-
We remove the original gauges and replace them with the new ones from the kit.
-
We thoroughly clean the dash while the gauges are removed.
-
We install the Gateway Bypass wiring harness
-
We reinstall the dashboard.
-
We water test the boat to be sure that everything is working properly.
To request this service, simply contact us via our contact link above!
Current pricing for a complete Gateway Bypass on 2003 - 2009 Nautiques is $2,656.66 + tax.