Monday, April 11, 2016

Refreshing the V-berths

Since we've completed making the two guest berths more presentable, we continued with our plan to do the same to the two v-berths, where Frances and I sleep.  Nothing fancy here, just refinishing the wood trim and covering the old, dull, wall covering with a nicer and brighter new color.

Taping the wood trim is a lot of fun if you are into torture, but by squirming around into a lot of odd positions, we got it done. Applying the Sikkens varnish takes just about 15 minutes. Making sure that it is done right by masking properly took us more than two hours per side.

Frances arrived while we were prepping the surfaces and her help taping was much appreciated. As it was, we spent all of Saturday and Sunday afternoons on this project and looks like we'll spend a couple of more afternoons to make it the way we want it.


This is the port side V-berth looking aft just after we finished scrubbing everything with Dirtex. Those dark marks on the wall next to the reading light wouldn't come off no matter how hard we scrubbed. By the end of the day, they had disappeared behind new paint.


This shot shows the wall above the port V-berth after the removal of a bookcase that had been mounted there. Someone in the past tried to varnish that bookcase without removing it first. Sloppy and lazy. The bookcase is now on our workbench at home where it will be cleaned and refinished properly.

It is rewarding to look back on this project as it nears completion and see how much more inviting the inside of the boat looks. One or two more weekends and we'll be ready to clean up the hull, refresh the boot-top stripe and put on a few new zincs. Then it's back into the water.

A few weeks ago we bought a knock-off of the Go-Pro camera. Yes, we know, we have more than enough cameras but we thought it would be fun to experiment with a body-cam. Even the cheapest Go-Pro cameras cost a couple of hundred dollars but we (and a lot of other people) found one that looks and works almost exactly like the real thing for, in our case, just $38.00.

Our body cam shown with a standard household duplex outlet cover for size comparison. The cam itself is inside a plastic waterproof housing.

 These aren't exactly precision instruments and have very few exposure adjustments but the video they produce has that crazy fish-eye look that you get from a lens with a 170 degree field of view. Go-Pro body cam videos are all over You Tube and are meant, it seems, to be used outdoors. There is no way to set the color temperature so the shot you'll see at the beginning of our video looks very red because it was shot under several CFL indoor bulbs. We sped it up so it hopefully wouldn't be too boring.


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