New Nav Lights and Mounting Board

The entire nav light assembly on Cay of Sea was in an advanced state of decrepitude about 4 years ago. You can only imagine what they were last week when I finally replaced them. The old fixtures were literally falling apart (had been for several years) and I couldn’t put them back together again. The ancient original teak mounting boards didn’t have any soft wood left – it was all baked and scrubbed out, grey and weathered.

I patterned new boards from the old with some scrap teak I have – my scrap was actually twice as thick as I needed, so I sawed the correct thickness with my table saw, effectively splitting the thickness with the saw blade raised high, then turning the piece over and sawing through the other side to create two identical pieces of board half as thick as the original. A little work on the stationary sander removing saw marks and relieving edges, then hand-sanding to a smooth finish gave me pieces that were ready for a coat of Cetol.

Mounted and wired, the new assemblies look like this:

The LED diodes in these little lamps are actually brighter that the 10 watt incandescent bulbs were, as they shined through the dull, frosted-over colored lenses of the old fixtures.

A photo of the bow. Don’t fuss at me for my rusty, unpainted anchor!

 

• led port and starboard navigation lights
• nav lights