Most our work on the boat the last few days centered on painting the beadboard planking that will be the overhead finish throughout the boat. Seemed pretty simple in theory... about a hundred and forty 12 foot boards to be primed and finished then cut to length and installed on the ceiling nailers that we finished a couple of months ago. As we began to paint, it quickly became apparent that I had vastly underestimated the amount of time that this was going to take to do this job. The rollers that we were using did not push the primer into the bead pattern very well so each board had to be hand brushed in the grooves, then rolled and tipped. Very time consuming. By mid afternoon we hadn't even made a dent in the pile of lumber in front of us. We decided to cut our losses and get a sprayer for the job. A quick trip to Home Depot yielded a little electric spray rig that, while not up to finish work standards, was sufficient for getting all the boards primed in a hurry. By the end of the day, my old painting shoes had a fresh coat of white primer and all the boards were done. The finish paint (one part polyurethane) rolled on much nicer and once we got a routine of rolling and tipping with a brush going, it wasn't too bad... still took us 10 hours of assembly line work to get one coat on the whole batch. One more coat to go... On the positive side, they look great and will add a really classic look to the interior. Staying with the overhead theme... when the painting just got to be too much, I spent some time finishing the overhead in the engine room. I've been meaning to get to this for a while and with the DC distribution panel in place, seemed like a good time to get it done. This job entailed wiring for all the overhead engine room lighting, cutting and installing pieces of aluminum perforated panels to cover up the overhead surfaces, then installing the lighting. Very pleased with the results and its nice to have all the mineral wool insulation finally covered up. Before closing up the overhead, I added two brackets that we will be using for hanging the exhaust system. The lights we used in the engine room are really cool... made by Aqua Signal, they are all LED, use a very small fraction of the energy that standard lighting does, and should (if they perform as advertised) last many tens of thousands of hours with no bulbs to change. They also can be switched to red which (besides preserving your night vision during night time engine room checks) gives the proper "battle stations" look to the engine room. With all the lights on and the engine room lit up like an operating room, we are just drawing about 2.5 amps at 12 volts... amazing. I plan on using LED lighting throughout the boat to keep our energy demands low. In fact, I just found a smoking deal on some very nice high end LED recessed fixtures that were on closeout. We have just begun some boat trials to find the right LED bulbs to go with them. The color temperature, beam width, and output of the bulbs are critical when it comes to LEDs and it all becomes subjective pretty quickly. The only way to really evaluate them is to get a bunch of samples and try them on the boat to see what looks right. More on lighting to come...
