To splash the boat in October 2022, I need to close up all of the holes in the hull that will be under the waterline. The biggest individual holes by far that I need to close up are the ones where I’ll weld in the main engine raw water supply standpipes. But the dozens of bolt holes for the swim platform supports are far more numerous.
I first started working on bringing the teak swim platform back to life in 2014. It looks absolutely fabulous now, encapsulated in clear epoxy with many coats of Du Pont MS1 clearcoat on top of that. I made some spacers for the swim platform supports in 2016, but then other things got in the way and I never finished that part of the project…until recently.
The swim platform spacers in 2016
I needed these tapered spacers because, for reasons I’ll never understand, Chris Craft made the big stainless supports with an 82° angle between the surfaces that mount to the transom and the platform. But the transom is perpendicular to the waterline that far down on the hull, so if the supports had been made at 90° there’d be no need for tapered spacers.
Anyway, the original spacers had rotted away by the time we started the refit in December 2007. I want these to last forever, so after cutting the tapered spacers so the platform would be level, I drilled oversized bolt holes and put a heavy coat of US Composites epoxy on them all, including inside the bolt holes.
Plastic-encapsulated swim platform tapered spacers
I decided to make the tapered spacers and platform supports a single unit to ease installation on the boat.
Apply caulk and insert bolts to ensure perfect alignment, then clamp in place
Next day, remove clamps and knock out the bolts
It’s showtime!
I’m using 3/8″ hardware in 316 stainless steel
Frankly, I think Chris Craft went way overboard on the hardware back here. If you put as many people as could fit on the teak platform, four 3/8 bolts for each support would have been plenty. But the holes are already there, so I’m going to fill them with 316 stainless.
The more I think about it, keeping in mind this is a metal boat, the more I wonder: why didn’t Chris Craft just weld aluminum pipes and angle to the transom for the swim platform supports? It would have been an elegant solution that avoided bolt holes through the transom, and it would have made a couple of hundred pounds of stainless platform supports unnecessary.
But now that I’ve really thought about it, I wish I’d thought of that back when we were doing all the heavy welding on the hull.
I used wedges to move the teak platform into position
The stainless support on the far side of the picture above is just hanging from one 1/4-20 bolt. Getting all the holes to line up between the supports and the transom across the 10′ span of the platform was challenging.
Once the teak was at the right height across its width, I test fit the bolts
Next I applied tape to make caulk clean-up easier
Repeat the process for all of the platform supports
Once the tape was done, I removed each support, applied caulk, installed the bolts, and removed the excess caulk that squeezed out of the joint. Everything went well until the last support on the port side.
See the 1″ bar welded to the transom?
I think it’s a sort of built-in boarding ladder. To the right of the support you can see where the bar was welded on that side.
In this picture from 2008, you can see the bar had been cut to make room for the swim platform support
The stub on the right side was cut off and welded to attach the right side of the bar to the hull
That weld attaching the bar to the hull intruded on the stainless support just enough that it wouldn’t seat properly to the transom.
Sharpie line shows the material to be removed
Done
With that little bit of stainless out of the way, there was clearance to the weld. I put in the bolts, taped off around the support, then removed the support, applied caulk, reinstalled the support and bolts, then cleaned up the caulk that squeezed out.
Done
And done.
So that’s a lot of little holes below the waterline that are now filled. This is a HUGE step toward splashing in October 2022. In retrospect, I was so focused on getting the platform installed but probably should have taken the time to strip the old bottom paint from the stainless supports. It would have been pretty to polish the stainless down to the waterline, too. But neither of those things would have gotten me closer to splashing the boat in October.
“Priorities…”
Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing Rechromed Deck Hardware
1969chriscraftroamer46 