1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Aft enclosure windows

With the prep work quickly progressing toward the day when we apply shiny Awl Craft 2000, I started cutting templates for the windows. I’d settled on a window manufacturer in Washington State that uses powder coated aluminum frames. This manufacturer’s design uses a clamp ring on the inside of the boat, with very precisely cut screws that thread into the back-side of the outside window frame. Since there are no screw holes on the outside, which are a common source of leaks, the clamp ring design is far better than most other window designs.

The one hitch with the aluminum-framed windows is that the tolerances are pretty tight: ± 1/16″. For all intents and purposes, there is no way to install these frames onto a structure that isn’t close to perfectly flat. Last week, I discovered that the welder who built my aft enclosure put twist into three of the six panels that have window openings, which induced an arc in the panels along the width of the window openings. The smallest arc had 1/8″ of deflection and the worst had 1/2″ , but all three were more than the 1/16″ tolerance the aluminum window frames could accommodate. This is in addition to the one panel he welded in the wrong place that was so bad I had to cut it off and relocate it a few months ago. Highly paid, incompetent “craftsmen” have been the bane of this refit since Day One…

After determining the aluminum framed windows wouldn’t work, I considered Eisinglass but decided against it for a couple of reasons. The first was that the enclosure was obviously designed with windows in mind, so it would look cobbled together to use Eisinglass. Also, since the whole structure is bonded and faired to the hard top, the last thing I wanted to do was start cutting bits and pieces off or doing other major modifications to already completed work.

Next I looked into fiberglass window frames, but the quote came back at $1300 each (vs roughly $350 each for aluminum) and I need six of them! The fiberglass window manufacturer did say, though, that his windows using tempered safety glass can be formed to an arc. So that got me thinking about a DIY solution that might be just as good and save a bit of money.

Two 20′ pultruded fiberglass I-beams provide the window frame material.

The FRP I-beams measure 2″ x 4″ and are very lightweight and rigid. Step one was to cut the 20′ I-beam into pieces just a bit longer than the window opening dimensions.

Pultruded I-beams cut and marked for size

Slicing the I-beam length-wise yields two T-beams

FRP pultrusions come with radiused inside corners

The radiused inside corners would not allow the T-beam frames to sit tight to the aluminum aft enclosure window openings, which have tight 90* corners. With a little milling, I knocked the radiused corners off.

A Freud top-bearing mortising bit on my Shop Smith made quick work of removing the radius.

With the pultrusions cut into usable T-beams, the next step was to dry fit, mark and cut each piece to make up the horizontal and vertical window frame pieces.

FRP window frames, rough cut and ready for bonding.

Vertical piece on the left, horizontal piece on the right, all rough sanded for bonding.

Nice, tight fit

Kerf cuts in the T-beam reflect the worst arc in the enclosure panel.

The shot above shows the solution to the worst arc the SMIB* welder put in the aft enclosure panel. The T-beam is tight to the window opening from the front edge to about halfway back, after which the window frame and panel curve in. You can see a 1/2″ gap at the lower right corner of the window opening. The arc begins to the left where the first kerf cut is. The kerf cuts allow the outside FRP panel to match the arc of the aluminum panel while still retaining the two-surface bonding area afforded by the T-channel shape. Tempered safety glass can easily be warped to fit and urethane will hold it all together.

*pejorative slang abbreviation for Southern Maryland InBred.

You can never have too many clamps…I need more.

I used US Composites thin epoxy resin thickened with West System 404 adhesive filler to bond the T-channel frames to the window openings. Wooden scraps helped spread the clamping force over wide areas. Covering the wood with shrink tape first helps ensure that the clamp spreaders will release from the epoxy after it kicks.

One down, five to go.

Outside view; two down, four to go.

I removed the clamps and blocks once the epoxy started to take a set, then quickly applied a small fillet around the exterior perimeter of the frame. The fillets are made of the same home-brew fairing compound we used on the cabin top and elsewhere on the boat. It’s based on the same US Composites epoxy resin and hardener as the adhesive, so the fillets make a perfect chemical bond to the adhesive epoxy that squeezed out of the clamped joint. Instead of West 404 adhesive filler, which is brutal to sand, I use a  2:1 ratio of 3M microballoons and Cabosil in the fairing compound to make for relatively easy sanding. The fillets make for a cleaner, more integrated install, just like they did on the cabin top to deck joint and at the helm station dash pod. Fillets also eliminate the seams where dirt can collect.

Unfortunately, this most recent detour from “the plan” took almost an entire week to identify, brainstorm and resolve, and everything else was on hold until I worked it out. I’ve only got so much vacation time I can take in a given year, and I blew five days of it fixing this latest SMIB-inspired problem. Another down-side is that we wanted slider windows for better ventilation but they’re impossible in twisted frames. On the upside, the total out-of-pocket cost for aft enclosure windows just dropped by a significant margin since my labor is free (of course).

Ah well, it’s a boat…they’re all about the compromises, I guess. It sure would be nice, though, to have competent craftsmen whose work is commensurate with the $$$ they charge. So far, the only workers who consistently perform to a high standard are the boatamalan fairing and paint crew. Speaking of which…

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Painting “the shiny” on the cabin top and decks. 🙂

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the Mahogany Toe Rail

OK…break time is over. Two weeks in Japan for a funeral followed by a week-long jet-lag hangover is all I can take…time to get back to work/play in the boatyard. 🙂

With the final Awl Grip 545 prime coat applied to the cabin top in mid-May 2013, the next order of business was to finish installing the mahogany toe rail that was rough cut back in early May. The toe rail has to be installed first because the approach we’re using is very different than what Chris Craft did originally. The biggest difference is that the boards are epoxied to the deck before we screw them down, as opposed to using bedding compound to seal the joint. The boards are also 1-3/4″ thick, as opposed to the original 1-1/2″.

The additional 1/4″ of thickness is hidden behind another big difference from Chris Craft and many other classic boat manufacturers’ approach to wooden toe rails: there is epoxy fairing compound and fillets covering the aluminum-to-wood joint. The fillets end 3/8″ or so above the joint, so there’s is virtually no opportunity for water to wick in between the wood and the aluminum deck joint below.

Gluin’ & Screwin’

First, we positioned the boards and clamped them in place. Then we drilled the screw holes and counterbores.  The screw holes went through aluminum deck. We then removed the boards and tapped all 196 holes for 1/4-20 screws. The next step was to mix up the epoxy and coat the bottom surface of all the boards. We had to coat the boards twice because the first coat really soaked into the mahogany. With the bottom side wetted out, we mixed the remaining epoxy with wood flour and coated the scarf joints, then troweled more epoxy and wood flour on the contact area of the deck.

Clamps hold the scarf joints together.

Machine screws threaded into the deck are the same way Chris Craft attached the original toe rails. But where the original screws were chromed bronze, we went through two boxes of 316 stainless screws to reduce the possibility of copper in the bronze interacting with the aluminum and causing corrosion. On the principle of “better living through chemistry,” we also coated each screw with Tef-gel before threading them into the deck. Tef-gel is said to be very good at eliminating corrosion caused by dissimilar metals.

Bungs give the rail a classic look

Initially, we considered doing the rail the same way they do at Weaver Boatworks, where they rely entirely on epoxy to bond the teak cap rails to their multimillion dollar sportfishermen. But the Weaver approach involves drilling hundreds of holes in the deck for clamps to secure the rail until the epoxy cures, after which the holes in the plywood deck are bunged and fiberglassed over. Since the Roamer is an aluminum hull with aluminum decks, I rejected the idea of drilling lots of holes.

We also considered using the original screw holes and screwing the toe rail down from the underside. But I’ve owned enough cars and boats to have condemned many an engineer who designs things without maintenance in mind. Inaccessible screws behind the cabinetry would not be maintenance-friendly, should any of the toe rail have to be replaced. So screws from below were a no-go.

While bungs present a hole in the top surface, though which water might migrate, that’s a concern only if we don’t keep up on the maintenance. Plus, I like the look of bungs…they add to the classic beauty, I think.

A shocking discovery the following morning!

I arrived last Saturday at 7am to find that the Boatamalans were already hard at work. They’d coated the entire toe rail with black spray paint…the same way they did when they were longboarding the cabin top. The downside of the spray paint is that it so completely covered the wood that you couldn’t see any of that beautiful grain. The upside came later in the day, when all the sanding was done.

Longboarding removed all the black paint… it’s ready for fillets

We first sanded the mahogany with 60 grit, then 120 and finally 240. The black paint guide coat really helped see low and high spots. We used that wonderful Mirka Abranet sandpaper–it’s expensive, but pays for itself in no time because it cuts like razors and lasts a good, long time.

Got wood???

Toe rail fillets and second story scaffolding

While the fairing crew was sanding away and then taping and applying the fillets in Awl Fair, I was building the scaffolding. We’ll need the second level scaffolding for painting the clear coat on the toe rail and for the AwlCraft 2000 Matterhorn white everywhere else.

Good lookin’ fillets!

The fillets here will serve the same purpose as they will at the helm station dash pod and along the cabin top-to-deck joint: they shed water and dirt far better than seams. They’re also much more aesthetically pleasing and should reduce maintenance.

On the inside fillets, we mixed up some homemade fairing compound with West System, cabosil and 3M , microballoons.

We ran out of Awl Fair, the red fairing compound, right on schedule. We’re fast approaching the end of the bodywork phase, so we’re trying to use up all of the canned materials that are open and have a shelf life.

At the end of the weekend, I cut the vent holes.

We won’t want to cut any holes like this after spraying on the shiny Imron MS1 clear coat.

Drill up from the bottom, then cut from the top.

Ready for Imron MS1!

Actually, the next step will be to sand the fillets around the toe rail, remove the tape, then retape over the fillet and spray the MS1 clear coat. Once we’ve got ten nice coats of MS1, we’ll tape off the clear coat, cover it with cardboard for protection, and then spray primer on the fillets.

If we can hold to the current schedule, we’ll be painting the topsides starting in two weeks!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: “Shiny” on the Toe Rail.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Fillets & Final Touches on the Aft Deck Enclosure

We are getting very close to painting the Roamer. Once we start painting “the shiny,” as my chief Boatamalan calls it, the paint work and exterior wood will be finished in seven days. Finally…it’s been a long time coming.

But before that happens, we still need to wrap up some things around the aft enclosure. We really like the fillet approach we’re using on all of the hard inside corners elsewhere on the boat, so we’ll use that same approach aft. We have to longboard the Awlquik we applied the previous weekend and finish fairing the aft deck above the transom. There are also a couple of screw holes and cracks we found on the underside of the original hardtop. But that’s pretty much it.

Wow.

I can’t believe how short the honey-do list has become. 🙂

Fillets and touch ups after longboarding the Awlquik,

The aft enclosure panels, being 3/16 5052 aluminum plate, were already pretty flat. Three good coats of Awlquik on top of the Max Cor aluminum primer gave us plenty of material to longboard without breaking through.

The stubby deck aft of the enclosure is a particularly challenging piece because a lot of welding happened here when Chris Craft built the boat in 1969. A lot of welding means a lot of heat, and even ALCOA’s finest plate tends to warp when it gets really hot. The result is a lot of fairing compound — up to 3/8″ in spots, but with aluminum high spots only a foot away! This deck will be mostly non-skid, so we’re not spending too much time on the middle, but the Boatamalans take great pride in their work and they’re making sure the shiny rim around the outside and at the fillets will be faired true.

In all honesty, though, even in the spots where they don’t put much effort in, these guys make the panels truer than most of the boats you see at any marina. They’re used to doing things to Weaver Boatworks’ high standards, so even their sloppiest work tends to be very, very good. There have been a few times when I’ve suggested to my chief Boatamalan that maybe, you know, a particular area doesn’t have to be that good. It is, after all, a metal boat. Sometimes he agrees, but most of the time he responds with a friendly lecture about quality and I see his point–when you’re taking the time to do it just so, why cheap out on the last five percent?

Seam? What seam?

I have to say…I didn’t think the Boatamalans were going to be able to do much to cover the hard seam line on the aft enclosure back panel without using a huge amount of putty. But, as when we faired the cabin top, you put lots of fairing compound on, then sand most of it off and repeat. By the time you’re done with the six-foot, two-man longboard and sand until you just hit the first high spot, you’ve got a very true surface with the least amount of compound required. The seam has vanished!

FRP covers the aft threshold seams.

Good lookin’ fillets!

The secret to nice fillets is…cake-making tools. Yup. The same spatulas of varying widths with the rounded leading edge that cake makers use to artistically apply frosting works very well for fillets in fairing compound, too.

Fillets at the helm door

Almost ready for a sliding door track.

FRP crack repair

There were long “gelcoat cracks” in both corners of the hardtop. When we ground into them, we found the cracks extended into the FRP matrix. So, as with the cracks we found in the cabin top, we ground them down and did a right proper repair. If we’re taking all this time to prep for paint, it just makes no sense to not put in the slight additional effort.

Ditto on the port side.

We repaired an odd crack near the leading edge of the hardtop, too.

The top-side of the hardtop is already painted with the shiny and non-skid. We use two layers of 20-foot wide Sharkskin to cover the paint and protect it from overspray from below.

Finally done longboarding the bullet-proof cabin top.

And finally done with the bow seat, too.

The hatches under the bow seat are flat…but the panel is curved.

These hatches will allow us to take advantage of the compartments I built into the bow seat. Access isn’t the greatest, but they’ll be fine for line storage.

The hatch is the mold for the fairing compound.

First, I applied a layer of shrink wrap tape all the way around the hatch frame so the fairing compound doesn’t stick to it. Next, I applied fairing compound to the FRP panel around the hatch opening. Then I installed the hatch so the middle of it fit tightly to the bow seat panel, with fairing compound filling the gaps at the ends. I put fillets on the compound and let it cure. All I have to do now is pop the hatches out and fill pin holes. This is more or less the same approach we used when making the corners of the helm door openings.

And that’s a wrap 🙂

I’m beat.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Final Priming with Awl Grip 545!

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Prepping and Priming the Aft Enclosure

My painter, fairing crew boss, and chief Boatamalan informs me that there are exactly seven “paint days” remaining before our Roamer 46 is painted with the shiny, non-skid and accent stripes…top to bottom.

Seven paint days… After five years, I’m ready for it.

Of course, since  we only work on the boat on weekends seven paint days works out to be about a month. So, it looks like we’re not going to make the end-of-May 2013 target, but we’re not far off. Before the paint days can begin, though, we’ve got to finish up the priming. And the last section of the boat that remains unprimed is the new (in 2008) aluminum aft deck enclosure.

Last weekend, we got ‘er done.

Rounding welded corners and sanding off mill scale

It was nice to see the boat in natural sunlight while I was transforming Tent Model IX once again. The aluminum to FRP hardtop fillets turned out nice.

This vertical welded seam creates a subtle but hard corner on the outside of the aft enclosure panel.

Even with the seam weld ground down and the panel sanded, there still is a bump you can easily feel.

If you can feel a bump, it’ll really stand out when it’s painted with “the shiny” AwlCraft 2000 Matterhorn White.

We mixed up some fairing compound and laid it out on both sides of the seam high spot.

I’ve found that US Composites 635 epoxy and their 4:1 hardener (their fastest one) takes a lot more time to cure than West System. Production time costs, so at this late stage of the game we’ve switched to West System and their fast hardener so we can mix up epoxy + cabosil (40%) + 3m microballoons (60%) fairing compound, apply it and sand it just an hour or two later.

Another lesson learned: buying a 55-gallon barrel of West System at the start of this project would have been significantly cheaper and faster than ordering US Composites in multi-gallon kits. If I knew when the project started what I know now…

While the fairing compound cured, we kept attacking the aluminum with sanders.

All of those nooks and crannies are a PITA! Once the sanding was done, I hit all of the corners, seams and welds with a wire wheel on my Makita sander. Meanwhile, the guys longboarded the fairing compound we applied around the welded seam on the aft panel.

With all of the longboarding, sanding and wire brushing done, we applied Alumaprep and then Alodine.

Next came the Awl Grip Max Cor aluminum primer.

The green stuff is Awl Grip Max Cor.

The vertical line of Max Cor is where just a hint of a weld high spot remained in the aluminum, but the guys faired it out so well that I can’t feel any high spot at all.

Max Cor is the replacement for the previous Awl Grip aluminum primer that was available when we first got the boat. The old stuff was yellow and didn’t stink anywhere near as bad as this new stuff, which is also 25% more expensive. Everybody in the tent had space suits, full face masks and VOC filters on, and the exhaust fan filters turned green in no time!

We didn’t fully prime the entryway with Max Cor because it’s actually coated in fiberglass.

The welds for the aft entryway are on the inside of the panels, which leaves an exposed seam without welds on the vertical surfaces you see here. We cut the door out after welding it all together, so the door and the opening would hold their natural, curved shape. Welding the exposed seams on the vertical threshold pieces would put a lot more heat into the panels and, because it’s aluminum, might cause warping — the curved door that fits the curved panel might not anymore.

We don’t anticipate any movement on the seams, but just putting fairing compound into a seam crack would just beg for the compound to crack in the future. So, we mixed up some West System thickened with 404 adhesive and wetted out the aluminum before applying wetted out 12oz fiberglass cloth over the seams in both vertical threshold panels.  The 404 keeps the fiberglass firmly attached to the aluminum, and the fiberglass will not crack the way filler might.

That’s a lotta green.

Fillets at every joint and seam.

The challenge was–how to apply Alumaprep and Alodine (both acids) and water to the bare aluminum without having any of the liquids wick in between the stitch welded aft enclosure framing and exterior panels. If any liquids got into the seams, there’s no way we could prime within the window stipulated on the Awl Grip product labels. After talking about tape and a few other ideas, we settled on mixing up more homemade epoxy fairing compound and putting fillets at every joint and seam. It was time consuming, but the fillets preclude liquids from entering the seams, and the primer film is now continuous over the entire aluminum surface, inside and out. Since aluminum oxide can travel very far under primer when there’s a break in the film, this approach should ensure a very long life sans corrosion for this enclosure and its paint job.

Nice fillets at the welded panel joints.

The aft-most panel turned out very nice and smooth.

After two coats of Max Cor, we waited 1-1/2 hours, then broke out the Awl Quik and a five-gallon pressure pot paint rig.

That hard welded seam has just sorta magically disappeared.

The fairing crew from Weaver Boatworks that’s moonlighting on weekends doing my boat…they sure do nice work.

This is turning out just like I envisioned with my cardboard mockups in 2008!

And with that, the aft enclosure was in primer!

I’m all giddy! 🙂

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Fillets & Final Touches on the Aft Deck Enclosure

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Priming the Cabin Top & Dashboard

Wow.

That’s all I can say.

OK…not really 🙂 , but seriously, what a slog it’s been to get to this point.

The last time the cabin top on this Chris Craft Roamer was whole, a consistent color, and shiny (to a degree) would have been sometime in the early to mid-1970s, when the boat was repowered with 534ci SeaMaster twin turbo and intercooled gas engines. The salon hatch for repowers that was collapsed has been rebuilt. The cabin top is now bullet-proof. The helm station sliding door openings are done. And everywhere you would have seen a seam between components, you now see nice fillets and rounded corners.

The problem is, though, that the closer you get to priming anything, the uglier it becomes. With complex construction based in aluminum, marine plywood and fiberglass, then topped with fairing compounds of varying colors and other characteristics, everything gets blurred together when a couple of guys spend days with six-foot longboards sanding down the high spots and making sure that every surface is true. Guide coat after guide coat of black spray paint further uglies up the project until it takes a real trained eye to see the beauty that’s just waiting to POP out for all to see.

Well, on Sunday, April 21, 2013, we got some serious poppin’ done!

Filling pinholes with Awl Grip High Build thickened with cabosil.

Pinholes are unavoidable in a faired fiberglass structure the size of a yacht cabin top.  If you prime and sand, then fill pinholes, you could spend a week getting them all and even then you’d probably miss lots that you wouldn’t see until you painted the boat. My weekend fairing/painting crew used the same technique to fill pinholes on the Roamer that they developed at Weaver Boatworks, where they build multi-million dollar sportfishermen on the other days of the week.

The process involves mixing a bit of cabosil with Awl Grip High Build. It’s hard to describe the consistency, but it’s not mayonaise, peanut butter or any of the other terms generally used to describe fairing compounds. It’s not runny…it holds a bit of shape. Let’s just call it the Boatamalan Secret Recipe. (Boatamalan = Boatyard worker of Guatamalan origin, a joking reference to the fairing crew’s Latin American ancestry). Whatever you call it, this stuff works wonders on pinholes and is applied with squeegees.

Boatamalan Secret Recipe on the dashboard

It’s not pretty when applied with a squeegee, but it won’t matter.

FRP door openings ready for Boatamalan Secret Recipe

Just enough Boatamalan Secret Recipe to fill the pinholes.

Boatamalan Secret Recipe isn’t used for shaping. Its only purpose is to fill pinholes. Where it might take a whole weekend to fill pinholes individually later on, it only takes a few hours using this approach.

Boatamalan Secret Recipe gets squeegeed all over the cabin top.

Smooth and pretty doesn’t matter at this point.

A thin layer of Boatamalan Secret Recipe covers the whole cabin top.

Boatamalan Secret Recipe applied

The next step after squeegeeing Boatamalan Secret Recipe all over is to apply Awl Quik, which is basically a sprayable fairing compound. After taping plastic over all of the openings, we fired up the compressor, put filters in the vent fans, and made the tent stinky!

Awl Quik yellow…not the prettiest color

This is sooo much better than before, when all of the different colors of material made it difficult to see the final shape. Now, all of the lines, fillets and rounded outside corners POP!

Dripping with Awl Quik

The painter applied two coats in rapid succession and then one more for good measure. The idea is to put enough Awl Quik on so we don’t sand through the Awl Quik/High Build layer when we longboard it. If we sand through it, we have to spray another coat and that means waiting another day before we can sand. Since we only work weekends on this project, that means another week will go by before we can spray the final primer–Awl Grip 545.

I’m diggin’ on the fillets at the dashboard.

Much nicer than the OE dirt-catching seam.

Before Awl Quik

After Awl Quik

Windshield base is true, strong and flat where it matters.

Check out those lines!

Beautiful fillets and rounded corners at the bow seat windows.

Don’t mind the runs and rough spots!

We applied two heavy coats of Awl Quik right over the squeegeed High Build and cabosil, so the surface reflects that now. The surface imperfections will sand off easily when we longboard. So long as we don’t sand through the High Build/Awl Quik layer, we’ll be applying 545 next weekend!

The bow seat itself got Awl Quik on the 3rd coat.

The painter needed a place to stand to put the second coat on the cabin top, so he waited to coat the bow seat until the last coat.

Salon window supports in Awl Quik

These supports in the salon window tracks are the only vertical structure over the whole length of the salon window openings. They’re made of mahogany and, from Chris Craft, rely on paint and bedding compound to keep rain water from wicking up the wood and rotting it out. Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t last too long.

We made new supports out of mahogany, but then fiberglassed them into place. Not only is this a more integrated approach than the original, it makes it virtually impossible for rain to ever affect the wood. The entire window channel is now fiberglass covered with Awl Quik.

Aft-most salon window opening on the port side.

The dashboard again…just because I love the way it turned out.

And that concludes our tour of the Awl Quik application

Longboarding begins anew next Saturday, bright and early. If we don’t breach the High Build/Awl Quik layer, we’ll have it sprayed in 545 on Sunday.

I’m all giddy! 😉

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Tools of the Trade.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Cabin-top, dashboard & Hardtop Details

Since October 2012, shortly after we resolved the paperwork SNAFU and resumed the project, we’ve been pushing hard every weekend trying to get the Roamer ready for paint. Our target has been to have her painted by the end of May 2013, and we’re close to meeting that deadline.

Making the cabin-top bulletproof was a huge step toward the goal, not only of getting her painted but also making this Roamer better than anything that came out of Chris Craft’s production lines. There was a slight set back when we found the previous repair under the windshield while working on the dashboard area, but it was better to find it then and fix it than to have cracks reappear months or years after she was painted. The helm station door openings to the deck were also challenging, but I was very pleased to see the woodworker and fiberglass crew turn my concept into reality. Fillets on all of the hard inside corners were the last big job in preparation for primer. All that remained was some detail work, and she’s ready for spraying!

The dashboard fillets and original gelcoat are nicely sanded and ready for primer.

With FRP tape covering the seam between these two components and a nice fillet over that, I think this both looks and will function better than the original dirt-collecting seam.

Final FRP at the top of the door openings.

We had to close the gaps between the original fiberglass hardtop and the new sliding door openings. After grinding down the surfaces to be joined, we wetted out 1708 bi-axial cloth with US Composites 635 epoxy, then used clamps to hold some precisely cut scraps of phenolic-faced plywood wrapped in shrink wrap tape and push the fiberglass into exactly the shape we wanted.

A few hours later, the fiberglass was ready to be trimmed and sanded smooth.

No fairing compound is needed when you use this approach. Epoxy doesn’t stick well to the phenolic-faced plywood and shrink wrap tape, so they just pop right off and you’re pretty much ready to go.

Upright-to-hardtop joint is faired

Fillets & rounded corners really help to integrate the new helm door opening to the original Chris Craft lines.

The window drain and channel turned out very nice.

More fillets and rounded corners at the helm doors.

I think the door openings look like something that might have been original to the boat, but then that’s just my opinion. Please comment! I’d rather hear that something looks goofy now than when it’s all in primer! 😉

Fillets and rounds at the base of the helm door opening

Nice transition from the upright bits to the deck, and should be a vast improvement on the original Chris Craft approach that used 1″ quarter-round painted mahogany screwed in place over the seam, with bedding compound to keep the water out.

Fillet material transitions from Awl Fair to epoxy + 3M microballoons + cabosil

Slider door track and pocket

Ready for primer!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Priming the cabin top!

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: The Hardtop

The hardtop on our Roamer 46 was in surprisingly good shape. Unlike the gelcoat on the cabin top, the gelcoat up above wasn’t cracked or otherwise degraded. I’m a bit stumped as to why it was in such good shape. The only thing that occurs to me is that the cabin top probably got buffed and waxed, unlike the “out of sight, out of mind” hardtop, and aggressive buffing may have broken up the surface of the gelcoat, leading to its ultimate demise. In any case, all we had to do on the hardtop was repair a bunch of holes previous owners had put in it for dinghy mounts, a crane for the dinghy, and a few different kinds of antennas, integrate the spotlight mount into the FRP layup, and then sand the whole thing with a DA. Then it was ready for a coat of Awl Quik over the repair areas, a final sanding in 180 grit before applying the Awl Grip 545 prime coat.

In early 2008, the crane was still on the hardtop.

I can understand the necessity of storing a dinghy on the hardtop in certain circumstances, but that crane was a horrible blight on the aesthetics of the Roamer. I still have it if anybody wants it, because it’s absolutely not going back on the boat.

Fast forward to April 2013…the hardtop is primed.

We closed up all of the holes by first grinding down the repair areas, then filling the ground out bits with a layer of fiberglass topped with the US Composites 635 epoxy + cabosil + 3m microballoon fairing compound we used to fair the cabin top. Once that was longboarded flat, we applied Awl Quik, sanded that and sprayed the Awl Grip 545 you see here. The fairing crew and painter did the work so quickly (while I was preoccupied transforming the tent into a paint shed) that I didn’t take any pix of the process.

All evidence of crane bolt holes and antenna mast base fasteners are gone.

This area of the hardtop was absolutely riddled with holes from hardware I removed, including at least six different antenna mast bases, of which only one still had an antenna attached to it when we got the boat in 2007.

When the painter sprays, we put filters over the the inlet of the box fans attached to the tent. They’re very effective at catching spray particles, though the chemical smell does go right through.

Integrating the searchlight base into the hardtop FRP.

One of the maintenance headaches on classic Chris Craft cruisers with searchlights is the mahogany searchlight base on the hardtop. Originally, the mahogany is finished bright and bedded in Dolphinite or some other kind of goo that eventually gives up and leaks. If you don’t maintain the varnish, the wood degrades and eventually you have a mess on your hands.

On this Roamer, the mahogany base hadn’t been maintained in 20 years. The wood was still solid (i.e. not rotted), but it was cracked down the middle. So we removed it, sanded it clean, epoxied the two halves together and bonded them with US Composites 635 epoxy and cabosil to the original position on the hardtop. We topped the mahogany with two layers of 9oz boat cloth fiberglass, then put a nice fillet all the way around. As with the fillets around the cabin top-to-deck joint and at the dashboard, this approach will shed water and lessen the amount of dirt that collected before in the seams between the two parts.

Awl Quik on the cabin top.

There was some Awl Quik left over from the hardtop, and this stuff (like all Awl Grip products) is expensive! So, rather than tossing it out, I rolled it onto the cabin top in the area where the salon roof hatch was rebuilt as part of the Cummins 450 repower (or more accurately, repowers, since the hatch had originally been cut out in 1973 and was again removed in 2008). We did a lot of work making the cabin top bulletproof, and when longboarding (with 6′ long, two-man longboards!) we discovered highs and lows all over, albeit the height difference between the peaks and valleys is very small fractions of an inch (2 mm or less). Still, that sort of variation would show up as waves in the shiny paint, and we’d like to minimize that if we can.

Most of this first, rolled-on coat of Awl Quik will get sanded away before the final coats of Awl Quik and 545 get applied, but it works well to fill the low spots and pinholes in the fairing compound.

The view from the bow deck in mid-April, 2013…ready for primer!

The view down the side.

The second story scaffolding outboard of the aft deck enclosure will allow us to prime and paint those areas easily. The plywood scaffolding deck overlaps the Roamer’s deck where the mahogany toe rail will go, and I’ve put screws into it through the bolt holes for the toe rail. This effectively ties the upper scaffolding to the boat and makes it very stable.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Cabin-top, dashboard & Hardtop Details

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Helm Door Openings, Rounds, & Fillets

While I was transforming Tent Model IX from a storm-resistant winter tent into a spring paint shed, the fairing crew made good progress rounding all of the edges on the cabin top, finishing up the helm door openings, and putting more fillets into the remaining hard inside corners.

A black spray paint guide coat shows when the line is straight.

Once the line is straight through the middle of the rounded edge, apply another light guide coat of spray paint and make the next beveled passes.

Keep repeating until you’ve got a nice, consistent rounded edge along the entire length of the cabin top.

At the bow seat, a router makes easy work of rounding the edge.

We were able to use a router here because you’re basically working with a <90* corner. The outside edge, by comparison,  is >90*, so there’s no good, consistent place for the router bit roller guide to run up against.

Beautiful transition from small to large radius rounds.

This is why it’s good to have professional fairing crews who work on multimillion dollar boats do your fairing work for you. They make it perfect and they’re fast! In fact, one of the toughest things for a guy like me (who has a day job, house and family) is keeping up with (and hopefully ahead of) this professional crew from Weaver Boatworks.

The rounded edges and fillets on the bow seat are works of art, too.

They’ll look even better in primer and then paint!

The helm station door openings are nearly done.

I seem to have lost the pix I took of the fiberglass work here but, as with the rest of the FRP work we’ve done, there’s a layer of 1708 bi-axial mat over the two layers of 3/4″ marine plywood here. We’re using Awl Fair here to make it smooth, mostly because I had a couple of buckets of it left over from when we faired the hull in 2008.

The port side hardtop support from inside the aft deck.

This looks just a wee bit better than when we first found the boat.

Circa December 2007

Port side helm door opening from the outside in 2013

Again, I think it’s reasonable to say it looks a tad better than when we found the boat in 2007.

The top of the sliding door pocket.

Mahogany finished bright will make up the right (inner) side of the door pocket…after everything’s painted.

Fillets on the deck joint to smooth things out

As with the other fillet work we’ve done, these ones cover a strong 1708 bi-axial FRP tape that covers the deck to cabin-top seam. We still need to round the edges here, but there’s only so many hours in a day!

Hopefully, you were too distracted by the fairing crew’s outstanding work to notice the plastic film taped to the boat in some of these pix. That plastic film is a very, very good indicator that somebody’s been spraying some sort of coating…

If I wasn’t so dog tired, I’d be giddy! 😉

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: The Hardtop!

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Transforming Tent Model IX, Helm Door & Fillets

Tent Model IX served its winter-time purpose extremely well, holding up without a hitch when Hurricane Sandy came calling and providing lots of space to get work done on the interior. Model IX was the culmination of years of shrink wrap tent-making failures and successes. With winter finally past us (maybe! It is, after all, only April!), it ‘s time to transform Model X into a paint shed.

I began by adding scaffolding aft and working my way around to the other side.

Since we’re not doing any heavy longboarding on the hull this time around, the scaffolding deck is down around where the water line will be. This should give the painter sufficient access to apply nice, wet coats of Awl Craft 2000.

Time to build the second story scaffolding.

The second-story scaffolding is just below deck level.

This scaffolding will allow the painter to step off the deck and paint the exterior of the aft deck enclosure, then step back onto the boat at the transom. A couple of cross braces make a huge difference in stability. The tent plastic itself will greatly add to stability, too, once it’s shrunk.

Reusing concrete forms for the scaffolding deck.

Back in 2008, when we first got the Roamer, I got a good deal on phenolic-faced 4×8 sheets used in concrete forms that are made with waterproof, boil-proof glue. I planned to use it as sub-flooring throughout the boat. But after buying it I found that the phenolic isn’t smooth and doesn’t stay attached very long–it cracked and peeled after a year or two just sitting inside the boat while I was straightening out the paperwork SNAFU. So I ripped it into 24′ x 96″ pieces and used it for the scaffolding deck.

The scaffolding decking is supported lengthwise with two 2x4s per section and more lumber at the ends. You can dance on it! I used screws so it will be easier to sectionally dismantle. If anybody needs a portable paint shed at a bargain price in a couple of months, let me know!

Scaffolding around the bow

There’s a step up in the right side of the pic that allows the painter to reach all the way to the rub rail at the top of the stem.

The long view down the starboard side looking back.

The step up at the bow.

Reused the old bow seat for scaffolding.

The white section of the scaffolding deck is the old bow seat that I cut off and replaced with something better. It follows the curve of the hull pretty good!

From the bow seat to the stern, the decking is all phenolic-faced plywood.

Putting up the paint shed skirt.

I’ll put a new sheet of shrink wrap over the top, but I need a skirt from the ground to about 12″ up because shrink wrap doesn’t come in 60′ wide rolls… and it would be extremely heavy if it did!

I cut this clear shrink wrap plastic off of our 1968 Chris Craft Commander 42 last weekend, in preparation for a spring cruise to see the cherry blossoms. The cruise happened but the blossoms have been delayed by unseasonably cold weather.  By splitting the Commander tent in half, I got enough plastic to do 2/3 of the skirt. Once all the pieces are in place, I’ll weld the plastic together with the shrink torch and tape up the seams. That should happen next weekend, unless the wind continues to blow like the dickens.

Meanwhile, on the inside of the boat…

The helm station door openings are now ready for fiberglass.

Since I last reported on the helm station door openings, we added strips of marine plywood to the steel uprights to make a pocket into which the doors will slide to keep out the weather.

Ready for FRP and fillets!

At the helm station, the dashboard fillets are also done and ready for sanding and primer.

Before: original dashboard pod seam–a great place for dirt to gather and hang out.

After: a nice and smooth fillet

FRP tape and epoxy holds the pod to the cabintop under the fillet.

That’s it for last weekend. Next weekend I’ll finish converting the tent to a paint shed, sand the fillets and prep the helm roof for primer.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Fillets!

There are many interior angles on the exterior of this Roamer, and Chris Craft smoothed many–but not all–of them with fillets. Since hard, non-filleted angles are weaker, subject to collecting dirt, harder to wash and tend not to shed rain as well, we’re putting fillets pretty much everywhere there’s a visible, hard interior angle.

Welded deck seam fillets just like the original, but better with modern materials.

We used the same homemade fairing compound we’ve been using for the whole project: US Composites 635 epoxy with 3M microballoons and cabocil (in a 3:2 ratio), mixed to a peanut butter consistency.

Fillets–To Eternity and Beyond!!!

The fillet on the cabin top-to-deck seam covers a heavy layer of 1708 bi-axial fiberglass that we applied over that seam. This approach should be far superior to the painted 1″ quarter-round mahogany that Chris Craft originally used to seal that joint that I talked about in an article on fairing the cabin top.

Same approach around the front of the base of the cabin top.

No more leaks, and looks a whole lot cleaner than the original quarter-round mahogany.

Fillets for every size corner!

At the edges of the new bow seat, we’re using a smaller fillet than what we used down on the deck. But it’s larger than the original fillet that came out of the Chris Craft FRP mold. Hopefully, when combined with the geometry changes we made when we built the seat, it will shed water (and dirt) better than the original, tight radius corner.

Still smaller fillets around the galley window openings.

Out of the original Chris Craft mold, there were no fillets to speak of here. Everything was pretty much hard corners, which collected dirt and propagated cracks.

The deck fillet terminates to a point at midships.

The cabin top-to-deck seam joint is filleted all the way back to the helm station door openings.

The fairing compound on the deck here covers the welded seam where once there used to be the transition from aluminum decks to teak.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Transforming Tent Model IX Into a Paint Shed.