1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Aft Deck Helm Doors II

My overarching priority has been to splash the boat as soon as possible, but not before the bottom is water-tight and the topsides are weather-proof.

I’ve taken care of all of the holes on the bottom, so the boat is capable of floating now: the swim platform is installed, as are the CAPAC reference cell and anode, and I welded in new raw water inlets for the Cummins main engines then installed all of the seacocks and strainers.

There are just three places on the topsides where weather can get in to areas I’d prefer it stay out of: the mast base on the cabin top; the bilge vents in the toe rail, and the port and starboard entryways to the helm from the side decks. It was a very long process to finally get the sliding helm doors installed, so I’ll present everything in a couple of articles.

When last you saw the helm doors, they were varnished and primed

It was November of 2020 when I first wrote about building the helm doors. But I’d struggled for years to find sliding door hardware that would work in this application.

I looked at other boats with sliding doors and found that many used sailboat rigging tracks and traveler cars, like Harken makes. But there were major supply chain disruptions and nobody had anything that would fit my boat. Out of desperation, I bought a set of heavy duty sliding door tracks for outdoor cabinets, but they attach to the top of the door and I was concerned they wouldn’t hold up in marine use. Still, they were better than nothing, and I was trying to splash the boat as soon as possible.

So I turned the cabinet sliding door tracks over the Boatamalan professional.

Helm door temporarily fitted with overhead slider track

It was at this time that I discovered a problem that had been hiding in plain sight since I first had the aft deck enclosure built in 2008: the aluminum side deck slopes down from the bow toward transom, but the top of the door openings of the aft deck hardtop are either flat or slope slightly down from back to front. So the distance from the welded-in door sill to the top of the door opening is shorter at the front of the opening than the back of it…by about 1/2″.

But it gets worse, because the sliding door hardware is 2x the width of the door (~48″), so when the door was slid open the aft bottom door-to-sill gap was ~1-1/4″ higher than the bottom leading edge when the door was closed. With the bottom of the door hanging free, it opened and closed just fine. The door-to-sill gap just went from 1-1/4″ at the back when the door was open to 1/16″ at the front of the door when it was closed. Problem: there’s no way to install any kind of door guide that would keep the bottom of the door in position with that kind of gap variation without looking seriously goofy.

And then, I found what I was looking for on Amazon: linear motion tracks.

Linear motion tracks

I’ll use the heavy tracks on the left for a pull-out sofa bed in the salon. The tracks on the right would be perfect for sliding doors.

The slide-out sofa bed tracks are stainless and aluminum…very heavy duty

The smaller tracks were sold as “stainless bearing steel” tracks and balls

The tracks are 1/2″ wide, 1200 mm (47-1/4″) long, and very low profile, even with the cars in place. Perfect!

But not really. Because over the bad times from February 2020 to 2022, when I wasn’t able to work on the boat very much, the tracks just sat in the galley gathering dust…and rusting from exposure to humidity.

Turns out the $100 tracks weren’t “stainless bearing steel,” they’re just hardened steel. So they’re completely inappropriate for exterior sliding doors on boats.

I spent days online searching and finally found a place in Virginia that makes almost identical linear motion tracks in 316 stainless. They sell them by the millimeter. The price for ONE with two cars…$7,000. And I need two, one for port and the other for starboard.

I went back to the Harken website, but their tracks and cars are really too big for my doors. And even if they weren’t, they were still having major supply chain problems and nothing was available. I was about to give up when I found a place called PBC Linear that had the solution to my problems: Mini-Rail Miniature Linear Guides measuring just 1/2″ tall including the cars. There are no moving parts. Everything is anodized aluminum, with a proprietary hard plastic bearing material. They have very smooth action. They also sell by the millimeter, but the set with four cars cost ~$500, which was even less than the sailboat hardware I was considering.

PBC Linear miniature linear guide with custom stainless door…perch?

I don’t know what else to call them. But the door will sit on the stainless angle, with screws securing the angle to the door.

The stainless angle is attached to each car with four screws

I got a 4-foot stick of 1″x 1″ 18 gauge 316 stainless angle, cut the length to match the width of each door, then cut one leg off each piece down to 1/2″. I used the scraps from that to make the pipe clamps for my fuel manifold.

So, at this point I had the track I wish I’d had back in 2020 when I started making these doors. But I still had the problem of the variable door-to-sill gap to work out.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Aft Deck Helm Doors III