Thread: Name boards
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Old 05-12-2012, 01:41 AM   #2
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
We made them ourselves, along with a pair of name and hailing port boards for the transom. They are more or less a copy of the factory GB boards but ours are longer than the stock boards.

We had the lettering done by a professional sign shop. It is in two parts, the gold upper layer and the gray drop shaddow. We completely finished the boards with some eight coats of varnish (this was before we had discovered Bristol) and took them to the sign shop and had them apply the lettering. Figured better mistakes be made on their dime than on ours.

This was in 1998. Every few years we give the boards another coat of finish. The lettering is the original but my wife made name board covers which protects them from the weather and UV so that has contributed greatly to their longevity.

Were we to do it again I would use a brighter or lighter gold or perhaps even silver. The lettering is actually rather dark, particularly under several coats of finish. Of course the right way to do it is to have the name carved and then filled with gold leaf but we didn't want the time or expense of doing that.

Very important when mounting the boards to stand them off the fiberglass a bit. If you don't moisture will get trapped between the boards and the fiberglass and stay there. Eventually it will lift the finish on the back of the boards and once that happens it's just a matter of time before the finish starts to fail on the edges and then the front. We used nylon spacers to hold them off about a half inch. Same thing with the boards on the transom.

For mounting the boards we used oval headed stainless screws with trim rings. There are four mounting screws per board--- the ones at the rear are hidden behind the nav lights.
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