CA&E: You said before that you wanted to get the speakers higher, more at ear level? How did you go about designing that?
SB: Like Brent was saying before, it was designing the interior while taking into account where all the speakers were going to go. So we knew where the seating areas were going to be, so it was prioritizing space inside the boat to mount these speakers. For example, in the rear lounge area there are actually steps to get you from the floor to walk out the back of the boat... In those steps are actually two speakers, out of the way... they're really at shoulder level.
GB: At the front of that lounge, they're literally built into the fiberglass seatbacks of the driver and passenger seats to save room.
SB: Most boats run a separate seat that bolts to the floor. Instead of doing that, we took the whole seat base and molded to the floor. First of all, that adds storage under the seat... Second of all, like Gary said, it adds space at the back of the seat to mount speakers on axis. And also for the driver and passenger, we wanted speakers up high... The passenger side wasn't too hard because there weren't a lot of components to mount, but on the driver side we had the throttle, the steering wheel, all the gauges, the switch gear... so we had to work around that.
CA&E: What would you say was your favorite part?
GB: Being done with it!
CA&E: When did you finally wrap it up?
GB: About the third day of CES.
SB: About half an hour before we left for CES. Right before we left we worked about 40 hours straight on that last run. We were completely delirious. My wife actually had to drive us out to CES. There was no way were driving.
GB: And that was after two months of seven days a week and 16- to 18-hour days.
SB: It was a brutal project.
GB: There were multiple 30-hour-plus stints. Probably four or five of them throughout the project where you have deadlines that you got to get to.
SB: There are just a lot of steps. For example, paint. The good thing is the painter that we found, Pete Mancini, was able to really expedite the project. He was able to paint the boat and the GL in about a little over two weeks--15 days, around there. That helped us out a lot. But even getting ready for that schedule. Getting all the primer, everything sanded, all the surface area prepped, was just brutal. And once we got the boat back from paint, we had to color sand and buff every surface inside and out of the boat. We had to do all the wiring, mounting the amplifiers, the speakers, all the components. In addition, one other big challenge we ran into was when we bring the boat to CES, our booth at CES is not on the main floor. We're in a meeting room and the meeting rooms really aren't designed to accommodate cars, so there's not a specific doorway to get a car in and out.
GB: There's a hallway.
SB: Exactly, so the door we had to get into was just under 92 inches wide. The boat's 96 inches wide. There's no way it was going through there straight. So what we had to do was enlist one of our buddies who's a really good metal fabricator, to build a custom dolly to mount the boat on... It had to be narrower than the boat and tilt it up enough to get it through the door. Well, tilting it up enough ended up being a 45-degree angle from the ground. So imagine tilting a 5,000-pound boat at a 45-degree angle and rolling it through the door. That was a really big challenge to get that thing done in time.
CA&E: But you did it ahead of time?
SB: Yeah, we did...
GB: But we weren't smart enough to have it built before we painted.
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