1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Spraying More Parts with AwlGrip Matterhorn White

We took a brief break from the V-berth cabinetry to spray a couple more essential parts with Awl Grip Matterhorn White. I also made a new roof vent for the tent. The heat the tent captures in summer is making it very difficult to get woodwork done. Sweat running onto newly shaped mahogany is not good!

The porthole for the laundry room

The Roamer 46 came with two round portholes in the V-berth, and ten rectangular portholes with screens, two in the V-berth and four on each side of the aft stateroom. The transom also has two windows built in, but they were originally framed in painted mahogany and could not be opened. In a gas boat, where station wagon effect can draw carbon monoxide into the boat and kill people, windows that don’t open at the transom is probably a good idea. But I moved the exhaust so it exits out of the sides of the hull of the engine room, and my Cummins engines are, of course, diesel. So there aren’t any down-sides to having more windows that can open. So I searched for two additional rectangular portholes and eventually found them on ebay. One of them has no screen flange, so it’s perfect for the laundry closet, where the dryer exhaust will vent.

Kinda like this

I’ll use a piece of plastic H channel as a seal between the glass and the plywood, which will be fiberglassed and painted after I cut the hole for the dryer vent.

The transom door finally gets painted

I fitted and finished welding the seams on the transom door back in November 2016, but that was during a stretch of bad luck for my painter. He’s finally back on his feet and was recently able to fair, prime with Awlquik, fillet, reprime with Awl Grip 545, and then paint the transom door with Matterhorn white. It turned out very nice!

Painted and ready to install

In addition to the heat build-up in the tent during summer, which I’d like to vent better, we also have to spray the last coats of MS1 on the mahogany toe rail. There are also numerous places where defects have shown up in the paint job. I’ll cover those in more detail later, but it seems that the 3M Premium Marine Filler we were using had some issues that 3M has since resolved. Unfortunately, they only cover the replacement of their product, not the paint repairs that have to happen when their product cracks due to formulation errors. On the bright side, I’d rather have small cracks appear while the boat is still in the tent instead of having rain get under the paint and start growing aluminum oxide powder under ever larger areas. So…to better vent the tent, I’m getting rid of the passive vent at the roof peak and installing a vent fan under a hillbilly rain deflector.

20″ box fan mounted to 1/4″ luan plywood scrap

Cleats outline where the rain cap will go

Don’t laugh…it works…and it gets even uglier

I initially had another piece of plywood across the top, where the short pieces of 2×3 are attached vertically, but it really choked down the flow. So instead I put a 2×3 across the top from side to side to give it strength.

Don’t laugh…it’s almost ready to install

I folded the shrink wrap under the duct sides before securing them with screws, leaving 18″ of plastic flapping all around the base. I can’t climb up on top of the tent, so the duct will go up through the current passive vent hole, and I’ll push the plastic out to (hopefully) drain most of the rain that hits it onto the surrounding tent plastic. The flappy plastic covering the rain cap duct opening will work like a shower curtain: it can’t stop all water from coming in, but it’ll stop most of it.

After I installed it and turned the fan on high, the temp dropped inside the tent over the afternoon by ~10°F, from ~120 to a cool 110. Booyah.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Cutting and Fitting More V-berth Panels

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Relocating the Fuel Tank Fills

Somewhere between 2008 when this refit began and 2012, when it restarted in earnest after the paperwork SNAFU, I spent some time with Sketchup making concept drawings how I thought the aft stateroom would look if the project ever restarted. By the time the SNAFU was resolved, I’d already purchased a new aft fuel tank that would go above the keel rather than outboard, like the original configuration. What I realized eventually was that the fuel inlets for the new tank were in the wrong spot–the pipes were pointing straight up on the headboard end of where a queen-sized mattress will eventually be. The fuel fill pipes on the tank don’t stick up all that much, but by the time I added hose and a 90° fitting it was going to be very tall. About 18 months ago I realized moving the fuel inlets would be the best approach. Then I got let down by yet another local fabricator/welder and decided I’d learn a new skill and buy myself a TIG welder to compliment my other welding machines. Recently I bought an AHP AlphaTIG 200 and have been practicing away on aluminum and also stainless. My first stainless project turned out pretty good–replacement pipes for the fuel fills–and my aluminum TIG welding was looking better with each hour of seat time I get. If I’m going to splash this year, the job’s gotta get done. So I got ‘er done.

Practice welds on 1/4″ plate

I pulled this 1/4″ plate out of the scrap bin in my garage at home when I was practicing my TIG welding. It brought back memories of the profoundly incompetent master fabricator at Chesapeake Marine Engineering, who after having my Miller Trailblazer and spoolgun for two weeks to learn the machine and practice (his shop welder is a different brand…Snap-on, of course), managed to weld the blobs you see on the left side of the plate. The welds on the right side and the fillet around the tube are mine, done after 15 hours of practice time with my AHP AlphaTIG.

$70/hr “professional” welds; the one on the right was his best

Aric Euler, the professional fabricator at Chesapeake Marine Engineering, blamed my lousy Miller equipment for the blobby welds (he owns Snap-on equipment, you see). But it turned out that the problem was he had the polarity switch going the wrong way and he tried to make up for that by welding in short circuit rather than spray transfer. You’d think he could have figured the polarity problem out over the two weeks he had the machine and the manual, being a professional and all that. Perhaps the Snap-On machine does it all for him…

100% amateur welds

I know…my welds are inconsistent, I’ve got craters in the ends, and since I didn’t preheat the plate the first weld was cold. I also didn’t grind the plate first, so there’s a lot of contamination. But compared to the welds done by the expensive professional, they’re not bad at all. The fillet weld on the pipe, which was particularly challenging because the plate is 1/4″ and the pipe is 1/8″, turned out quite nice, if I do say so myself.

I know I could do with a lot more seat time practicing, but time’s a wastin’. I’ve got to get the tank fills done.

The honey-do list

AHP AlphaTIG moved into the Roamer salon

That’s a great thing about these inverter machines–they’re very light compared to older transformer machines. 60 pounds goes up the ladder much easier than 350 pounds does.

Forward tank moved out of the bilge

Another plan that changed was fuel storage management for the forward 125 gallon tank. If I use the normal fill, I’d have to cut another hole in the exterior. And every hole I cut is an opportunity for a leak or for the paint to fail at some point in the future. So, I’ll use fuel lines and a pump to fill the front tank from the rear tanks. The front tank will supply the genset as well as a hydronic boiler system I’ll be installing one day, and in a pinch it can also supply fuel as a day tank for the mains.

Front tank filler inlet cut off

Plug cut with hole saw

Straighten 1/16″ 5056 spoolgun wire, then wipe with acetone

Three passes around…not pretty, but sealed well.

Strike one line off the honey-do list

Move TIG machine to the aft stateroom

Cut off the port fuel inlet

and then the starboard fill

Filler inlet from the front tank fits great in the aft tank

Welding the top around the new fill was fairly easy

I know, I know…not exactly a “stack of dimes.” But it’s fused well all around.

The underside was extremely difficult

I’d been practicing welding flat on a table in my garage while sitting with everything at just the right height. Then I practiced vertical welding on the same table with everything just so. I’d heard that “out of position” welding could be challenging…I’m here to attest that “challenging” is a HUGE understatement.

The new tank fill inlets are pointed back at the transom, which is 18″ away. The steering gear is 12″ below the fill, so there’s no easy way to squeeze in and look up at the under-side of it. And my welding helmet adds to the joy of fitting in this confined space. I ended up laying on the tank with my head hanging over the end, basically welding upside-down. The welds aren’t the prettiest, but they’re solid and well fused all around.

Port side old fill ready to be capped

Good fit on the starboard side

Not the prettiest, but it’s well sealed

Port side done

Starboard side done, with three passes around the old fill cap

Striking lines off the honey-do list

That’s a wrap for relocating and capping the fuel tank fills.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the Fuel Fills

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Engine Room Steps

I’m not sure what the original steps down into the engine room were made of, but when I found this Roamer 46 they were made of two greasy 2x4s screwed to  a couple of mahogany sticks. I have a hard time believing Chris Craft did that, but who knows? I found some leftover aluminum tubing and sheet while cleaning up during the conversion of Tent Model X to Model XXX, and l figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone–make a better set of steps and get some aluminum welding practice. It’s a lot different than welding steel, and I’m a rank amateur at that.

Steps I removed from the boat…can’t possibly be OEM

20′ stick of 1″ x 1/8″ wall 6061 aluminum tubing

Miller 280NT Trailblazer engine-driven welder

I’ve been really impressed with this Trailblazer. With my Spoolmatic 30a MIG gun, it worked great welding the new propeller shaft strut barrels in and on other projects. Then it sat unused for a year while I focused on other things, including dealing with the aftermath of the bastard thieves who stole all of the parts, materials, and tools on the boat back in 2014. A little solar charger keeps the battery topped up, but I expected it might have trouble starting. But–good news! I hit the starter for 10 seconds and she ran great!

Not quite dialed in, but not bad for the first zzZAP.

For short welds like this it would be nice to have a TIG machine, but I don’t do enough welding to justify buying one and spending the time learning how to use it. So I’ll just get ‘er done with my spoolgun.

I hit the joint with a flap disk to clean off the mill scale and surface corrosion, then wire brushed the area with my “aluminum only” stainless brush before starting the weld. It would have been better to hit the whole area with the flap disk. I’ve learned that aluminum is very sensitive to contamination in the weld area–way more than steel.

Not great, but better than a couple of greasy 2x4s

I’ll tie in a second set of side rails and rungs, then add 3/16″ plate for the steps.

Weld overkill or practical practice welds?

A couple of tack welds would have sufficed for the  step plate-to-rung weld, but I ran continuous beads to practice my technique. I don’t have the smooth hand that good welder pros do, but this is a non-critical application and the continuous bead should make up for shortcomings in my technique.

Welding the top-side of the rung

Got a bit of undercut on the right side of the weld in the pic above, but it’ll be fine for a set of ER steps.

Ready to test fit

Way better than greasy 2x4s

The piece of wood on the left of the above picture was one of the mahogany stick uprights for the previous steps.

Good fit

Unfortunately, I ran out of Devoe 235 epoxy primer, which is what I’ve used as a surface coating in the engine room. Worse, the local distributor stopped carrying Devoe, so now I’m trying to find another local source. The cost of shipping from the regional supplier is more than than the gallon kit itself, because it has a government-mandated “HAZARD” sticker on the can. That, and a few other things, got me wondering how many boat refits stall because of the cost added by government regulation? That said, I’m not going to let a gallon kit of epoxy kill this project. I’ll just paint the steps later. For now, they’re a great improvement over what was there before.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the Porthole Screens

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Completing the Bow Seat Window Installation

With two out of three mahogany panels installed for the galley/bow seat windows, next I wrapped up installing the center window and the port panel and window.

Center and starboard bow seat windows are installed

The boat’s filthy!

Once the outside is waterproof, I plan to wash the whole thing. Gotta get the windows in first.

Glue and clamp the port panel in place

2×4 pushes the edge tight to the side mahogany panel

Next day, off come the clamps and in goes the window for a test fit

Nice fit at the corner [pats self on back 🙂 ]

I’m a weekend warrior woodworker, so making these panels fit–with all of the angles and bevels–was a huge challenge. Fortunately, it turned out pretty good. After the way things have gone with most of the highly paid professionals on this refit, it feels good when a rookie like me does a better job than the pros.

Blow off the dust and get ready to install the window

Taped off and ready to install

Alcohol cleans the sealing surfaces, Sikaflex 291 LOT is the sealant, and I used some leftover Awlgrip T0170 Surface Cleaner to clean up any caulk residue that remains after I pull the tape.

Center opening window is a very cool feature.

Motion Windows design is outstanding. I really like the center opening windows, and the fact that there are no exterior fasteners or holes to let in water. It’s too bad they consistently oversize the windows so they don’t fit in the window openings, and Motion’s unprofessional response to my complaint about oversizing should serve as a warning to anybody planning to purchase from them.

Et voila! Done!

It’s great to finally have the bow seat windows and interior mahogany panels installed, especially with winter coming. And this winter looks like it’s going to be a whopper. Temps in the Mid-Atlantic region have been very warm in December, just like they were in 2003 when we first moved to the area. If the pattern holds, I expect that around the second week of January temps will drop below freezing and stay there for a month, though it hopefully won’t be as brutally cold as it was last year. We’ve had a few mornings that dropped below freezing, and I can already tell there’s a huge benefit from the spray foam insulation I installed earlier this year. So the cold won’t be an issue; the bigger concern is snow.

The boat explosion next door in July 2015 shredded my tent shrink wrap film and broke some of the tent frames in addition to blowing out a window and damaging my brand new Awlgrip paint. Tent Model X has been awesome–a vast improvement over Tent Models I through XI–and it was tough enough to survive Hurricane Sandy unscathed. But there’s no way post-explosion Tent Model X  can hold up to the roof loads of a snow storm, and I’ve got to re-make the scaffolding so the paint damage can be fixed. Which means I’m back in the tent-making business…

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Tent Model XXX

1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Installing the Port Engine II

After setting up the gantry, cutting off the original engine beds, and sending the original Cummins engine mounts off for modification, I’m ready to finish the port engine installation. It’s going a lot quicker than the starboard engine installation…lots of lessons learned there.

Before: inner rear engine mount needed machining

Rear engine mount with slot relocated to fit the Roamer

Rear engine bed parts made from 3/8″ thick aluminum angle

My Shopsmith Mark V table saw with the band saw and 12″ disk sander attachments made quick work of manufacturing the engine beds. It’s really nice to be able to use woodworking tools when machining aluminum, and the Shopsmith packs a lot of different tools into a small footprint.

Aluminum engine bed bonded with West System epoxy thickened with aluminum powder and cabosil

Front engine bed cut from 3/8″ aluminum angle

Filthy engine bilge needs some scrubbing

For an engine room that hasn’t had an engine run in it since I sandblasted and painted the bilge in 2009, there was a lot of oily residue under this engine. The oil actually came from the Ford Lehman engine I initially installed that was rebuilt by Chesapeake Marine Engineering. Consistent with the quality of other work Aric Euler did for me, the engine leaked oil and made a mess. The Lehmans are long gone though, and now the oily mess is, too. Good riddance!

Engine bilge cleaned up nicely

I also have to say that gantry I made is slick! [pats self on back]. Being able to move this one-ton engine around with one hand, or rotate it 90 degrees to get it out of the way is super helpful.

ZF 280A marine gear sump doesn’t clear the engine bed frame

The Cummins engines and ZF gears are identical side-to-side, so the clearance problems are somewhat different from the port side to the starboard. It turns out the port side was far easier to fit.

Bosch jigsaw with a metal-cutting blade easily makes space for the ZF gear

Moroso 400w engine oil pan heater installed

After sanding the paint off the aluminum oil pan, I wiped down the surface with acetone and bonded the Moroso oil pan heater directly to the metal. Then I ran a bead of RTV silicone around the pad and let it sit for 24 hours. With these oil pan heaters installed, I won’t need the (reportedly) troublesome intake air heaters that come from the factory on these Cummins engines. I may remove those later.

Original seacock has to go

The original seacocks were 1-1/2″, which is too small for the Cummins 6CTAs. I’ll cut out the old pipe and weld in new 2″ standpipes later, but first I need to remove the old seacock while the engine is out of the way. The tough part is getting the pipe wrench to bite without damaging the seacock (coming soon to the For Sale section) and still have swing room, but without bashing fingers on the metal framing. Demonstrating the timelessness of “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” I used a 2×4 to swing the pipe wrench and get the seacock moving.

Boom

Ready for the hole saw from the under-side

The epoxy bonding the rear engine beds together will take a day to cure, then I’ll bond them and the front engine beds to the stringers and paint everything with Devoe Bar Rust 235 epoxy coating in tintable white base. After that, I’ll drill and bolt the engine beds to the stringers to augment the epoxy bond and then final fit the engine.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the Port Engine III

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Shiny Matterhorn White on the Hard Top (again)

I’ve finally caught up completely to where I was in May 2014 when the bastard thieves took everything they could carry out of the tent. The hard top was already painted, but since they stole the aluminum drip rails I had to break open the paint to fiberglass the edge where the drip rail would have mounted. The burglars also grabbed half of the aluminum helm windshield frame extrusions, and the new frame I had made required me to break open the paint on the cabin top and add some fairing compound to get the fit just right. We painted the windshield frame a week ago, and over this last weekend we painted the hard top and cabin top (again) with Matterhorn white Awlcraft 2000. I’ve gotten a lot of other things done over the last year in addition to recovering from the theft loss–the aft stateroom walls are in, the spray foam insulation is done, the galley bulkhead is in, and I made a gantry and installed the starboard engine–but with the paint work done I can finally put the theft behind me; from now on it’s all progress toward the goal of launching in 2016.

Taping off the hard top after sanding the Awlgrip 545 primer with 320 grit

Fillets and fiberglass might even look better than the original aluminum drip rail

Fume extraction system

The 12″ axial fume extractor fan hose goes down to a filter box. At 2000cfm, the fan pulls in pretty much all of the fumes and overspray, and no particulates come through the filters. It’s a pretty slick system, and works especially well in confined spaces.

Cover Guard diamond plate plastic floor covering for dust-free walking space

Windshield area is ready for paint

New windshield frame paint is protected

Windshield frame bolt holes get taped from the salon side

Painting in progress. Exhaust fans, on…no overspray coming out

Shiny!

My Boatamalan* painter calls Awlgrip topcoats “the shiny.” The guy has serious skills when it comes to laying this stuff out glossy and flat.

* Boatamalan: portmanteau indicating highly skilled boat workers of Central American origin. They’re actually from Honduras, but Boatamalan rolls off the tongue better.

Good lookin’ fillets!

Foam roll tape is super expensive for what you get, but it makes an invisible blend

Check out that reflection!

The major paint work is now a wrap. I sent the windshield frame patterns to Motion Windows, and the new helm station windshield windows should be done within six weeks. We’re letting the paint cure for a few weeks before installing the windshield, so I’m shifting gears and heading back down to continue on the aft stateroom head ceiling.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Moldings for the Aft Stateroom Head

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Sparkly Shiny Helm Windshield Frame

It’s nice when I make actual progress on this boat. Since the windshield frame extrusions and a bunch of other stuff were stolen by bastard thieves back in May 2014, a lot of what I’ve been doing has been playing catch-up, trying to get back to where I was before the burglars cleaned me out. Before the theft, I had spent a bunch of time, money, and effort getting the original windshield back into good condition.  I’d made the last of the new connector pieces and machined and welded together a new opening center windshield, since the original had been removed by a previous owner and replaced with a sheet of acrylic plastic. All I had to do was reassemble the windshield frame and install it…but then half of the extrusions were stolen. So I had to rebuild the tent into a spray booth (again) and do some fiberglass and fairing work all around the hardtop, since the thieves took my drip rails, too. I eventually got a new windshield frame welded together, though the fit wasn’t quite as good as it needed to be. So that necessitated breaking open my brand new Awlgrip paint job to modify the hardtop and cabin top to fit the new windshield frame. All of this effort wasn’t really making progress, it was just getting me back to where I was the day before the thieves ripped me off.

Well…I’ve now gotten past that point (on the windshield frame, at least). In the whirl of activity to get the windshield primed and painted, I forgot to snap pix along the way. But the frame got a couple coats of Awlgrip Max Cor CF aluminum primer. We sanded that and gave it a couple coats of Awl Grip 545 primer, then final sanded that with 320 grit and basically turned the aft deck into  a spray booth. The new windshield frame is all sparkly and shiny!

et voila! Shiny!

Check out that reflection!

The paint is surprisingly dirt and blemish-free

What looks like hazy nastiness in the pic above is actually the reflection of the plastic walls of the “spray booth,” perfectly reflected in the mirror-like finish of the paint. My Boatamalan painter has got serious skills when it comes to laying down Awlgrip.

Sparkly black metallic Awl Grip

The metallic black is subtle inside the tent…I wonder what it’ll look like out in the sun?

Shiny on the interior side, too

Spray booth disassembled in 3 minutes flat

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Shiny Matterhorn White on the Hard Top (again)

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Fillets On The Hard Top

Breaking open the Awlgrip paint job was tough, but it was the best way to resolve the problem caused by thieves stealing my drip rails (and a lot of other stuff) back in May 2014. With the paint ground back on the joint between the top and bottom halves of the hard top, and new fiberglass and fairing compound laid over the joint, next we sanded the fairing compound and used fillets to smooth the edge.

First, sand down the fairing compound

The great thing about hot-coating home made epoxy fairing compound over fresh fiberglass is that you don’t have to get itchy twice. Sanding the fairing compound is much easier than grinding on fresh fiberglass (thereby weakening it) and applying fairing compound over that.

Gotta love fillets

Awlfair is a great product for fillet work. And on this project, we’ve done lots of fillets.

Later that day, after the Awlfair kicked, we sanded the fillets smooth

Next day, we taped off the boat and sprayed Awlquik

Bad lighting, good fillet

Without a drip rail, rain will tend to drip from all over the hard top, but I’m OK with that. One thing I’ve noticed is that boats with drip rails tend to get very nasty drip lines at the spot where all the rain drips off. This may not be a problem with boats outside of urban areas, but mine will definitely be an urban boat, and all of the dust that settles on the boat and gets washed off by rain will be evenly distributed now that I don’t have a drip rail.

That’s my theory, and I’m stickin’ with it. Gotta see a bright side in this whole theft thing somehow… 🙂

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: The Helm Station Windshield Frame

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: The Aft Deck Hard Top (again)

Back in May 2014, my boat project suffered an enormous setback when bastard thieves broke in and cleaned out my tools, all of the materials they could carry, and a bunch of brand new and classic Chris Craft parts. Included in the  Chris Craft parts they grabbed were aluminum extrusions for the windshield and the drip rail that goes around the aft deck hard top. I assume they grabbed them for scrap value, along with a bunch of chromed bronze pieces. At the time, aluminum was getting $0.78/lbs at the scrap yard, so the bastard thieves ended up with $50 worth of aluminum for their trouble. After months of searching, I was able to find the original foundry that extruded these parts for Chris Craft. The good news was that they still had the dies. The bad news was that they only do runs of 600 pounds at a cost of $16,000 each, and there were a half dozen different extrusions total that were stolen. 6 x $16,000 = oy vey.

So I spent  a lot of time trying to figure out how to replace items that were economically irreplaceable. I came up with a plan for the windshield and a fabricator who said he could do it. Unfortunately, that didn’t end up as well as I’d hoped (though I haven’t given up hope on that just yet). On the drip rail, after trying to come up with alternatives in wood, PVC, and other materials, I finally decided to go with what I know works and will give the best long-term bang for the buck: fiberglass, fillets, and AwlCraft 2000 Matterhorn white.

$16,000 extrusion made of unobtainium

One thing the drip rail did was clamp together the top and bottom halves of the hard top. The edge between the two is relatively unfinished, so without a cap on it it’s pretty ugly.

First tape off the whole boat, then grind off the brand new Awlgrip paint.

Grinding off that brand new paint was maybe the most difficult thing I’ve done on this project. I mean, except for one day when I converted the tent, this paint job has never seen the sun. It was perfect…no bugs, no runs, nice flow…my Boatamalan painter really did a nice job.

In the pic above, you can see the remains of some of the silicon-bronze screws Chris Craft used to attach the drip rail to the two halves of the hard top, holding it all together. Many of the screws broke off when we removed the drip rail in preparation for the paint job back in 2013. The remains of the bronze screws will soon get entombed in epoxy, so I’m not concerned about removing them.

Joint prep looks good

The joint is covered with epoxy thickened with wood flour

After wetting out the surface with straight epoxy, the epoxy thickened with wood flour fills screw holes and other imperfections in the original hard top, giving the fiberglass layer that’s coming next a smooth surface to adhere to.

Wood flour

The under-side of the hard top joint is ready for the fiberglass layer

Wetted out fiberglass gets applied over the joint

It was difficult getting the ‘glass to lay down on the top because of the relatively sharp turn it has to take from the bottom to the top of the joint. But we kept pushing it down in contact with the epoxy on the hard top until it started to cure. Once it was good and tacky, the fiberglass layer stayed put. Then, before it cured too far, we hot-coated it with fairing compound made of epoxy thickened with 3M glass bubbles and cabosil in a 70/30 ratio.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Fillets On The Hard Top

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Cummins Engine Install — Coating the Stringers & Final Fit

With the vibration isolator landing pads done and motor mounts modified, the last step to getting this engine resting in its ultimate location is to epoxy coat the stringers and do the final alignment.

New forward vibration isolator landing pads are on the same plane on both sides

After the last test fitting, once I had the gear and shaft couplers aligned to within 0.005″, I marked the holes for the vibration isolator bolts. After moving the engine out of the way with the gantry, I drilled an 1/8″ pilot hole then used  increasingly larger drill bits until I finally opened up the 1/2″ hole.

Rear vibration isolator landing pads spread the load

New Moroso 400w oil pan heaters should keep the engines toasty in winter

I’ve had these oil pan heaters for a while, so it was nice to finally install them. Truth be told I almost forgot about them (like when I left the washer in the aft stateroom head), so it was good that I remembered before bolting the engines down for the last time. After taking the pic above, I ran a bead of high temp RTV around the perimeter of the heater to seal the edge. The Cummins 6CTA marine oil pan made it a bit challenging to install since it doesn’t have a flat bottom. These heaters have to be in 100% contact with a heat sink or they burn up. Even little bubbles caused by a surface that’s not perfectly flat might cause it to fail, so I broke out the sander and knocked it back to flat and smooth bare metal. Why anybody thought it was a good idea to put the company logo on the bottom of the oil pan is beyond me but it’s gone now.  🙂 The heater pad seemed to conform to the shape just fine.

With the holes drilled and pan heater installed, it’s time to bust out the stinky Devoe 235 epoxy coating.

Rolled and tipped Devoe 235 epoxy coats the assembly

Devoe is super tough stuff, but it’s an industrial coating so it doesn’t roll and tip to a pretty finish. But for the engine room, I’m more interested in protecting the metal than super shiny gloss. In addition to coating the stringers and landing pads, I also put another coat in the engine bilges.

Devoe 235 epoxy-coated front stringer and engine pan

Epoxy coating is done. It should be adequately cured in 24 hours.

Tefgel on all 316 stainless vibration isolator bolts

Tefgel lubricates threads, prevents galling, and controls corrosion. With the inside of each bolt hole coated with Devoe epoxy, direct metal to metal contact shouldn’t be a problem. But Tefgel is cheap insurance.

Front vibration isolators…DONE!

Rear vibration isolators…DONE!!

Shaft alignment is within spec, but the DriverSaver hardware isn’t!

Having paid $300 for a chunk of rubber, I expected Globe to send the right size bolts with its DriveSaver kits. But they use 1/2″ bolts instead of the 5/8″ ones ZF used for the gear coupler, so I had to buy an adapter kit. But the bolts that came with the DriveSaver kit are so short that only one thread sticks out past the lock washer on the gear-side of the flange. Also, the instructions for these Made-in-America rubber donuts were completely wrong: the gear flange is male, but the instructions say it should be female, and the bolts are completely different from the male to female side of the Drivesaver. I emailed the company and showed them the problem. We’ll see if they respond.

Longer bolts on the gear flange side should solve the problem; prop shaft-side bolts seem fine

In spite of this latest minor setback, the engine is in its final resting place. I can wrap up the DriverSaver install when new, longer bolts arrive. So that’s a wrap for the heavy lifting.

Time for the gantry to get out of the way

I’m really pleased with all of the space around this engine. Maintenance should be a breeze (crossing fingers here).

It took less than 10 minutes to disassemble the gantry

I cannot tell you how nice it is to have floors back in the salon!

Et voila! Done! (sorta)

The fuel system is 75% done, since I ran the supply and return tubing when I installed the hydraulic steering. The electrical will be a good project for the winter or, more likely, next spring. I plan to install the other engine and wrap up the exhaust systems before winter sets in again. But for now, I’m calling the starboard engine install a wrap.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: The Aft Deck Hard Top (again)