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Tiki Central / Home Tiki Bars / Mariner Mike's Below Decks [Completed!]

Post #789894 by Mariner Mike on Wed, Sep 12, 2018 7:58 AM

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The lighting is finally done! After three weeks of steady progress wiring light fixtures, I finally connected up the dimmer switches and after that was all done I donned my headlight, shut off the breaker, and wired the whole thing to the existing light circuit. When I flipped the breaker back on I was greeted with a blinding dose of... darkness.

Praying I hadn't made some horrible mistake I re-opened the breaker and checked the connection I had just made... where it turned out that one of the wires hadn't actually stayed in the nut. A quick re-tightening and voilĂ ! It's alive! Both circuits working. Thunder crashed in the distance. (Actually. A crazy storm blew in out of nowhere. If you were watching Thursday Night Football it delayed the Eagles a half hour. Obviously I had no idea it was coming or else I wouldn't have had my hands in the wiring)

Meanwhile, in the past, I had started work on painting my light fixtures. Red and green for the port/starboard; blue, purple, and orange for the floats, with a frosted glass coat on top. I learned the hard lesson of patience over the course of them, by the last one I actually managed to mostly avoid it pooling up and dripping, just in time for me to be done. Ain't that just the way. Honestly though even the rough ones have sort of a jetsam feel to them so I'm not too bothered.



I then set to the work of tying up the replica floats. I found some great coconut fiber rope at the blue big box hardware store which really captured the look I was going for. Minor hand cramps aside, it was actually pretty fun to do. I got to put to great effect the first knot I learned back in scouts, and it reminded me of watching my dad string fishing poles. It gave me this great feeling of being a 19th/early 20th century fisherman, without all the backbreaking labor and potential scurvy. Very much the idealized fantasy version, in keeping with the tiki spirit.



Can you tell that the blue one was my first attempt at both painting and knotting? I hauled them all down to the new space and gave them a test.

The blue and green weren't coming across as well as I would have liked, so I added a couple more coats to the green and I broke out a deeper blue paint, which gave me the opportunity to re-knot that one. I also tried some different temperature bulbs in the floats, which made a big difference in the blue and orange, but I might switch the purple back. Ah the weird ways light sources and paints can interact.


I'm still trying to figure out what exactly to do with bulbs for the overhead lights. I didn't realize that they were a weird in-between base size (E17). I tried using a plug adapter to E26 and a small-ish Edison bulb but the filament sticks out a bit too far because of the adapter and so it doesn't quite work.

I really don't want to flood the space with light and I'd very much rather a more amber tone than a white one, so I sort of skipped over the brighter more focused bulbs one often sees in recessed lighting. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Next steps are wiring up outlets for an under-sink pump (looking for recommendations on those as well if anyone has any experience), the bar appliances (you know, blender, mixer, ice crusher), as well as whatever else needs plugged in. Then it's plumbing, and, finally, decorating.

Talk about seeming so tantalizingly close yet far. Cheers everyone!