1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Salon Cabinet Install

For the foreseeable future, I’ll be posting new things on this blog, but it’ll be a mixture of things I did years ago but never posted and very recent stuff that’s wrapping up aspects of the project that began as much as a decade ago. Longtime readers who find themselves thinking, “wait a minute…I think I’ve seen that before” will be right to a degree. There’s just a lot of stuff that I started on and wrote about but never finished up until much more recently.

Waaaaay back in 2015, I cut some mahogany panels to replace rotten ones we found just under the surface of the original salon cabinetry. Chris Craft didn’t finish the inside of most of the salon cabinetry, so when you opened the gorgeous mahogany cabinet doors, you saw not particularly attractive gray and white paint on plywood or the bitumastic-coated aluminum hull. I decided I wanted attractive cabinet interiors instead. So with the mud dauber screens installed in the engine room air intake vents, it was time to build and install the port interior cabinet box.

In fact, I did all of this work sporadically over the last three years, but it was only days ago that I installed those wasp screens and put a bow on that part of the refit.

I’m going for the same basic look as the original, but without all of the rotten mahogany

The bulkhead behind the stairs and the panels next to the stairs and behind the settee were rotten in spots. Those were the ones I replaced in 2015.

Under the blue plastic, those stairs are gorgeous

You can see the ventilation hose from the aft stateroom air conditioner. With all of the insulation in this boat, I believe the Flagship Marine 12k HVAC unit will be far more than the aft stateroom needs. So I decided to run a vent line to the salon, since that’s where most of the air conditioning challenges are on these boats.

Building the cabinet box on the back-side of the panel I cut in 2015

The idea is that I want the interior of the cabinet to be attractive when the doors are opened. But I also want to be able to remove the cabinet box if necessary, so it will all be held in place with screws that are easily accessible from inside the cabinet but not particularly visible without putting in some effort. At first glance, you open the cabinet doors, and you’ll see pretty mahogany.

The HVAC vent transition box will attach near the top of the panel

The 1″x1″ mahogany cleats that all the panels attach to are glued and screwed in place

I used US Composites epoxy to wet out the back-side of the panel, then added wood flour to make the glue. The screws are applied from the back of the cleats, so there are no bungs on the panel face.

24 hours later, the epoxy is cured

You can see that I left an inch-wide strip around the perimeter of the panel dry. Those are the contact areas where I’ll glue and screw the panel to the new cleats on the floor and the original Chris Craft mahogany joinery that remains in the salon.