1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Repurposing Old Doors

I’m hoping to get back into the project within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ve been cleaning out my garage, posting old boat parts on ebay (see my For Sale page), and getting a lot of low impact stuff done that have been low priorities for many years.

When we were disassembling the boat way back in the beginning, we took a lot of plywood panels, door, and glass off the boat. The glass got tossed pretty quickly, but the plywood has come in handy as I put the boat back together. I’ve only got a couple of the original panels left, most of them are for the salon settee. I’ll use them as patterns for new panels eventually, but that’ll be the last of the cabinetry I do on the project. So I have to keep them in storage for a while. But I’ve had a couple of old doors taking up space in the tractor shed, and I decided it’s time to turn them into 1×1 mahogany cleats. But by the time I’d run the boards through my thickness planer, I couldn’t bring myself to turn all of them into cleats.

There’s nothing quite like old enamel paint over weathered mahogany

After removing the glass, I took off the door handles. The set screws were all stripped, so I had to destroy them to get them loose.

Salvaging the hardware side

I was unable to remove the hardware inside the door, so I ended up slicing the mahogany on either side of the metal. With a 1/2″ hole drilled horizontally most of the way through the mahogany there, I wasn’t going to get full-length boards out of it anyway.

After running it through the thickness planer

Time to make some cleats

That’s some pretty mahogany

Not so pretty mahogany

These were the wing doors for the goofy aft enclosure that was on the boat when we first got it. I covered that part of the demolition in Aft Deck Enclosure Demolition — Enter the Chainsaw.

What the hell was I thinking???

The bottom of the door wasn’t the only place that rot affected in this area

But above the rot..gorgeous

Next I cut off the angled portion along the piano hinge screw holes

Then I squared up the other side

4-3/4″ of beautiful old mahogany

I ended up with two 72″ board and another that’s 68″

I’ve got a fair amount of mahogany boards still in stock–more than enough to finish this project–but I couldn’t bring myself to cut these long boards int cleats. I’ll put them to good use somewhere before long. Someplace that’ll show off that pretty grain.

Relocating the blog to https://1969chriscraftroamer46.com .