The first task of the day was to finish the navigation lights refurbishment and to that end I made a start after breakfast and my first cup of tea. The new bulb holder needed to be put in place and connected, a second mirror reflector cut out and installed, the gasket put in place and the housing screwed back on to the boat.
The new bulb holder fitted well and you can see in the photo that the connections have been made. The negative cable screwed to the fitting using crimped eye connectors and the positive cable connected using a lever connector. The new holder is sufficiently shorter at the back compared to the original to allow the lever connector to be placed between the holder and the cable coming in through the back of the nav light. I won’t detail the mirror reflector work since this have been done in a previous post.
Some lanolin was smeared on the housing which allowed the gasket to be “stuck” to the metal and kept it in place whilst the unit was reassembled. You can see the black gasket in the photo above. This assembly was repeated for the starboard side.
When all was done the lights were tested. Here the port light.
Here the starboard.
It’s not so easy to see from these photos but you can quite clearly see the reflection of the bulb in the mirror reflector when viewed from the side showing the the reflector is working as intended.
And to complete the test, here is the stern light which was already converted to an LED bulb and needed no work.
So the navigation lights are now done and that task may be crossed off the list.
By this point I had to stop and retreat inside. Firstly to wash the lanolin off my fingers, even when cold that stuff is sticky, and secondly to warm my fingers up. It’s 9 Celsius outside today according to my weather station but the wind is bitter. I think I was probably only outside for an hour before I started dropping things due to cold fingers.
So…
Time for a cup of tea.