Prior to purchasing our boat I became a member of the Catalina 470 association. This site is filled with great info and problems that owners have run into and the associated solution. For example I had a leak in the aft cabin ceiling that was very hard to track down. I went on the owners site and the fix was to loosen up the cockpit table tilt it to one side and re-caulk the aft leg which is used for a wire run and will sometimes leak (problem solved). In addition to identifying problems there are all kind of great upgrades that owners have completed on their 470’s. These upgrades are well documented and usually include pictures. The 470 is equipped with dual racor spin off filters for the fuel system, which are a pretty nice feature as most boats normally rely on a single filter. The only down side with the set-up is that each filter is dedicated to a fuel tank i.e. the port fuel tank runs off one filter and the starboard tank runs off the other. In order to switch out a filter you have to change tanks as well, which is fine if you have fuel in both tanks. Bill Martinelli (a 470 owner) re-plumbed his set up so that he could change from filter 1 to filter 2 without changing tanks. I liked the idea of having this flexibility and also added a vacuum gauge to assist in monitoring an increase in vacuum which would show I had a filter clogging. This upgrade included building a back board out of Lexan adding a few ball valves and voila. Now I can swap filters in two sec by opening a few valves and ia can also change tanks of the fly. This was a nice change and pretty easy to do.
The new fuel set-up. Valves on the left are for the two tanks (feed & return) and the valves on the right are for the two racors (feed & return). Note the vacuum gauge I mounted in the center.
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