Shades of Gray.

In an attempt to nonskid the side decks today we ran into a little bit of a color problem.  After the owner had selected "Twilight Gray" and the color chip had been sent to Advance Coatings Co. to be matched the end result was a little off.  The desired color is the light gray in the middle and the result was much closer to the bottom (darker) gray.  I could see that the gel was off but wanted to take a picture of it and send it to the owner to verify that the color had to be lightened.  Looking back I should have just lightened it and rolled it on the boat.  We mixed up a small batch of gel and put it on a scrap of nidacore (pictured) and I ran over to the house to grab the camera.  Obviously today is the day that the camera decides to die.  Well it didn't die but it is terminally ill and will not take still photos anymore, video still works but the color quality on the video made it next to impossible to show the gel color differences.  Now with no way to show my maine-based gel coat to my georgia-based customer, I make an afternoon trip to the city to buy a new camera.  Back to the shop and back to my color chart and sample nonskid armed with my new resonably priced camera.  Take the photos, post the pics on picasa, call georgia, leave a message, wait patiently, get a call back.................."yeah that color's too dark".  If anyone shows up for work tomorrow (SAT) we are going to mix in some white (maybe 1 gal white to 4 gal gray) until the color is closer to the desired "Twilight Gray".

Here is one of the custom teak peices from Hewes & Co., a drawer/trash can combo that will be located in the galley.  They also dropped off doors, drawers, double sliding door frames (??), trim rings, and panel for the fridge.  Basically anything I didn't feel like making I farmed out to them and they did an excellent job.  All this stuff would just eat up hours and we felt that our time could be better spent on other parts of the boat while we waited for the parts to be built.  I'll post some pics of the installed items tomorrow (the new camera's battery only had enough life to take a couple pics, and the book said to fully charge the battery on the initial charge to protect the life of the battery) they are really giving the galley a "finished" look.  Even though it isn't really finished yet.

All the words are where they should be, this isn't as hard as I was making it yesterday.  Next I will learn how the reader can click on the photo to see a larger version of that photo.  Then embedded video and live streaming web cams.  Then live chat sessions and eventually (once we get enough followers) we build a boat for the fans and give it away to the 300,000th person to leave a comment or start a thread in the forum.