When I was last fitting the aft stateroom walls, I made a mistake. I didn’t have my computer with me or a print out of the plan drawings, and it had been a long time since I’d studied them. The panel that I fitted as the aft wall for the washer & dryer closet was, in fact, supposed to be the wall separating the main hanging locker from a narrower locker (for laundry supplies and a clothes hamper below) that is next to the washer & dryer closet.
oops
Fortunately, the aft deck slopes down toward the transom on Chris Craft flush deck boats like mine, and I have to move the panel aft. So all I will have to do is trim some more off the top of the panel to fit it to the shorter space. If I had erred the other way and cut the panel on the short side, it would have been much more difficult adding material back to the panel to make it taller.
Nice plan, but I didn’t add porthole openings for reference
There are a few critical dimensions in the plan, the most important being the hull components since they can’t move. Of course, that includes the porthole openings. Next come the hard parts that need to fit within the hull, like the washer and dryer. Everything else — the walls, hanging lockers, drawers — can be shifted around as needed. Using intuition to figure out where the panel went was a bad idea.
I trimmed the panel where it conveniently fit…in the wrong place
With the panel in the pic above located where I first installed it, the washer & dryer closet is about 5″ wider than the plan, which is based on the actual dimensions the laundry machines require. I could leave it where I put it, which intuitively made sense because it landed between two portholes and would bolt to a frame. But if I do that, the narrow hamper locker would have to go away. The hanging locker would get a bit wider, but I’d have 5″ of inaccessible and unusable space in the washer & dryer closet. I really don’t want to waste the space. Soooo…gotta move that panel.
Laying out new lines to match the plan, which puts the panel…
Right smack dab in the middle of the porthole
OK, before anybody freaks out about the big, curved cutout, keep in mind that this panel is almost entirely out of sight most of the time. On the left side, it’s the inside of the hanging locker. On the right side, it’s the inside of the narrow hanging locker/hamper. It was fairly common for Chris Craft to end up with a similar situation when they built boats. I cut the hole big enough that the porthole will be openable and, if necessary, can be removed for maintenance without too much trouble.
The hanging locker bulkheads, per the plan
Just need the corner pieces
On the principle of making lemon aid out of lemons, I had spent lots of time on the interior concepts during the paperwork SNAFU that finally got resolved in 2012. Once I’d created the basic model and worked out the fundamental stuff, like bulkhead and major wall locations, I started digging into details, one of which was the corner pieces.
Full aft stateroom plan
Chris Craft originally used hard, 90° corners everywhere, driving the screws into solid stock that was bonded to the edges of the panels or with 1″x1″ cleats on the inside corners. This approach ends up with a lot of bung work, which I wanted to avoid where possible. I also wanted round corners. Soooo…
Zoom in a bit to see the component details
In Sketchup, I selected the lines and surface of the corner piece in the red circle above, then copied and pasted it as a separate component.
The corner piece plan
Corner piece (scrap) in real life
The corner pieces turned out very nicely. I’ve sent them off to the paint shop for coating with ICA clear base coat.
Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing Aft Stateroom Walls I
1969chriscraftroamer46 
Watch out, Chris Craft might hire you! Superb attention to detail. You would have made a great Signals Intelligence Analyst (my profession).
Thanks! How’s the pay???