1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Turning Mahogany Plywood Into Aft Cabin Walls

A couple of posts back, I wrote about laying out the lines from my plan drawings on the floor of the aft cabin and took measurements for the major walls/bulkheads. Now it’s time to transfer the measurements to a few sheets from the stack of mahogany plywood that’s been on the boat since 2013.

Time to reorganize the wood pile

Yes, there’s a stack of mahogany and Douglas fir marine plywood standing on edge up against the forward galley bulkhead. I know it’s not good for ply to be stacked like that, but there was no other practical way to have it in the boat for the months we were doing the paint work outside.

Shuffling plywood around

Squaring the edges

This right here is why I bought my Eureka Zone EZ-ONE Woodworking Center: there’s no other way I could rip a 4×8 sheet of plywood using a table saw in the salon. With the EZ-One, the toughest part was restacking the plywood to pull the 3/4″ sheets from the pile! Lifting the sheets onto the table, squaring it, and making the cut was a breeze.

Squaring also gets rid of the edge that was damaged during shipping

One panel ripped close to the final width

Then, without having to move the panel at all, I just clamped the EZ-One track slightly longer than the final height and did the cross cut.

Wall panels cut to height and width

Cutting the curves

I cut the curves on the wall panels using the measurements I took from the upright stick to the hull in my last article.

Bosch laser makes one-man measuring a breeze

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Mahogany Wall Panels to the Paint Shop and Back