1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Wiring the Aft Deck Floor Boxes

After my recent three-month hiatus from the blog, I had a lot of site maintenance to catch up on. There were many dozens of recent subscribers I had to confirm, so hopefully you all get the notifications when I post new articles. Thanks for signing up and for your patience while I was away from the blog dealing with the ongoing wrongful termination crisis.

Also–this is funny–the comment spam filter was packed with comments from legit subscribers. It turns out WordPress flags comments that include the term “wood porn.” LOL

I’m going to keep using the term regardless! I’ll just have to be more diligent in checking that spam penalty box and manually approving comments.

That said, I’ve got a lot of very pretty aft deck mahogany bits that need to be installed, now that they’re coated with ICA base coat clear. But before I install the zigzag aft deck floor boxes and the rest, I need to run some 120v wiring around the aft deck perimeter.

Reusing an OEM hole in the aft deck teak

I fished a length of 3-wire tinned 12ga cable down through the hole in the teak through which Chris Craft had run the wiring for the searchlight and wipers. I’ll secure the cable around the perimeter in preparation for installing the mahogany floor boxes that will cover the hole and other ugliness near the wall-to-deck joint all the way around.

Inside the aft stateroom head, the cable will run behind the paneling, then up to the main breaker panel

Padded cable clamps every ~16″ secure the wire

At the transom, I installed mahogany cleats

I glued and screwed 1″ x 1″ mahogany cleats recycled from the original toe rail to follow the curve of the transom and teak deck. The cable clamps are then screwed to the cleats. Once this part of the project is done, the next will be to cut 1/4″ mahogany plywood panels to cover the transom from port to starboard. The panels will butt up against the cleats you see here to hold the bottom edge in place. More on that later.

Compound curved cleats needed some kerf cuts to make the bends

The arrows marked with Sharpie are where the mahogany plywood panels will butt up against each other. I’m planning on covering the butt joints with mahogany trim. I’m pretty sure I’ve got some solid stock laying around I can use. 😉