1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Remaking the Salon Settee IV

This salon settee is a big piece of furniture. I’ve never made furniture before…well unless you count the V-berth as furniture. This settee also has built-in HVAC ducting, so it’s a pretty complex structure for a weekend warrior like me. But it’s turning out pretty nicely, and I already cut the major panels. I just need solid mahogany pieces at the corners to tie the major panels together.

Time to turn a pretty piece of mahogany into settee corner pieces

The block on top of the board in the above picture is a leftover corner piece from when I assembled the aft stateroom walls. It’s a pattern, basically. But because I don’t have any more 8/4 boards that are long enough to make the corner pieces I need for the settee, I’m using 4/4 boards that I’ll epoxy together.

45° angle cuts on either side total 90° for the corner pieces

This post covers things I did last fall. It was extremely challenging doing woodwork on the boat toward the end of its tenure on the hard in Deale, MD. In preparation for breaking down Tent Model XXX, I moved my table saw and ShopSmith back to my house in the fall of 2022. So any time I needed to machine some lumber, I had to make the measurements in Deale, then drive home (one hour each way) and cut the lumber. A minor error (remember, nothing on a boat is square) that could easily be corrected with the woodshop tools on-site turned into a multi-day slog. Fortunately, the salon settee corner pieces didn’t cause me much grief.

That’s what I had in mind

It’s hard to tell in the picture, but that’s two 4/4 sticks with a 45° cut on either side of both. Put the narrow ends together, and you get two 90° faux-rabbets with 90° between them, same as the corner pieces I made years ago from 8/4 stock.

The grain is gorgeous

Two corner sticks bonded with US Composites 635 epoxy thickened with wood flour

I found a crack at the end of one stick

After thoroughly wetting out the crack with straight epoxy, I used a squeegee to force wood flour-thickened epoxy into the crack. Then I got fancy with some clamps to hold it all together.

Crack? What crack???

Next day, test fit looks good!

Semi-final dry fitting looks good

I marked off the corner pieces for rounding to match each panel

Then back to the house to round the corners on my jointer

Looking good!

Back to the boat for final shaping with a sander

Nice!

Back in the salon

Perfect!

I had some panel cap pieces I made earlier in the refit

The cap pieces are basically C-channel shaped solid mahogany, with a 3/4 gap between the two legs. All I had to do was widen the gap a bit to accommodate the veneers on either side. They look a lot better than the inside of the Tricel panels.