After a recent night sail at the club lake I noticed that several of my superstructure flood lights had burnt out, this is a pain, but a great excuse to finish off a project I started a few months back and ran out of enthusiasm to finish, namely, replacing all of the cast white metal deck lights on my Smit with working replicas.
I originally started this conversion by turning 8mm diameter Acrylic rod on the lathe to replicate the light body of the originals, cross drilling a hole for the GOW to live in and then adding a brass tube for the stem, progress was good and all the replicas were painted, so a final lighting test was done before installation, only to find, to my horror, that GOW bulbs get much hotter than I had appreciated and the heat was blistering the paint straight off the Acrylic, so one useless batch ended up in the bin and I started again.
This time, 3mm LEDs were used, a couple of test units completed and they passed the paint blister test with flying colours, one quick wiring job later and they were ready for the next night sail, along with the upgraded navigation lights to LED, with spot and mast lights to follow.