1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Mahogany Veneer on the Aft Stateroom Hatch Hole

The Whisper Wall headliner installer didn’t show up last weekend, but there’s plenty of other stuff for me to do to get the headliner installed. Like cranking out that beautiful mahogany aft stateroom hatch trim ring. But I can’t leave the hatch hole in nasty OEM white paint. And repainting it doesn’t seem right either. So…I figure I’ll use some mahogany veneer to make it pretty.

I’ve got two boxes of veneer in stock–one is rotary cut and pretty red, the other is quartersawn (ribbon stripe) and more brown. I think the rotary cut red will do the trick.

I had a couple of scrap ribbonstripe veneers that might have done it

The wood back in the aft stateroom has red hues. In the V-berth, it’s brown ribbonstripe. I also don’t want two seams in the veneer, since that doubles the chances of seam failure. This is a hatch, after all, and on nice days it’ll be open, and summer squalls can pop up quickly and get things wet. The fewer seams, the better.

4′ x 8′ rotary cut red mahogany veneer has been sitting in a closet for years

I’ll use contact cement in this application, not epoxy

The OEM paint is in surprisingly good condition…just needed a good sanding

Water never got in here and neither did much sunlight. So the OEM paint isn’t checked or otherwise distressed.

Veneer backing soaks up contact cement

Two coats of contact cement on the hatch hole

Et voila!

This was scary. If you’re doing it right, contact cement locks in tight on contact. Because I’m putting veneer on the inside of a tube, it had to be lined up just so at the beginning and maintained all the way around. If I was off a fraction of an inch in alignment at the start, it’d be a mile off four feet later. I got lucky! In retrospect, I should have cut the panel an inch or so wider. There would have been more waste, but I wouldn’t have had to be so precise with the alignment.

I used a razor knife to trim the excess veneer from the tube top and bottom, then slid the new trim ring up to see how it looks.

That’s going to look fabulous with the headliner installed

The veneer is trimmed and sanded with 240 grit Mirka Abranet

Time to break out that stinky ICA base coat clear varnish.

Three coats later…this turned out super nice!

The ICA added so much material to the inside diameter that the trim ring no longer fits easily. No problem, I’ll sand the OD of the trim ring down a bit when I do the final install, after the headliner is installed.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Mahogany Trim Ring for the V-berth Hatch