1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Aft Deck Mahogany Floor Boxes

The aft deck is coming together very nicely as more and more spray foam insulation gets covered by beautiful mahogany. I always knew I’d use mahogany plywood for the major wall panels, but for something like the last eight years, I’ve been pondering what to do about the transition from the walls to the original teak deck. Mahogany quarter round would work in places where the plywood panels directly contact the teak deck. But toward the aft end of the deck, the plywood comes down to contact painted aluminum where the original mahogany toe rail used to be. There’s a 3-1/2″ gap of white painted aluminum before the teak deck begins. There are also holes drilled in the teak deck, where Chris Craft ran the original wiring for the windshield wipers and searchlight. Patching a hole would look goofy, and I don’t want to start replacing teak deck boards.

So…what I decided to do was use the leftover 5/8″ thick mahogany boards resawn from the aft stateroom fascia panels and make a couple of box structures. In addition to hiding holes in teak and unattractive panel transitions, I’ll also be able to use the boxes as wire chases to get 120v outlets to the aft deck.

Clearing space for a long mahogany box

The box will zig then zag here

And it’ll cover this unattractive painted aluminum here, at the aft end of the deck

There’s still tape stuck to the teak from the big paint job back in 2013. That stuff was a bear to remove!

5/8″ mahogany boards…meet Mr. Tablesaw

Time to lay out the box

Box panel one

The zig and zag joints got marked off

A few cuts on the miter saw, and the box wall started coming together

Once the walls were cut, I made the box tops

This is going to look good!

Unfortunately, the camera battery died after this shot, so I don’t have any pictures of the final fit-up or when I glued the boards together.

After final fitment and glue up, I rounded the box tops’ outside corner and cut holes for the electrical boxes

Electrical outlet box is cut

That’s a good looking zig zag box!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Varnishing the Aft Deck Mahogany

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Top Coating the V-berth

Lots of stuff has been going on with the boat. One of the reasons I moved it to Deale, MD back in 2009 was because the marina was much closer to the Boatamalan painter. Now that I have to pack up and go by April, I need to get the painter moving on spraying the ICA top coat in the interior. Since the V-berth is the closest to being done, that’s where we started.

An ugly panel joint needs covering

Lotsa push sticks clamping a strip of mahogany over the joint

When the epoxy cured, the painter went nuts with the sander

Heavy coats of ICA base coat the new wood

That’s eight coats of ICA base in total.

I had to get the mahogany door jambs made before we spray the top coat

This will be a slider door here. The mahogany stick I’m working with here will have a slot cut out of it for the door edge to slide into.

Fit. Cut. Fit. Cut. Route. Fit. Miter cut. Fit. Repeat.

The doorjamb pieces and last mahogany panel trim piece is glued and clamped in place

Wait for the epoxy to cure, then bust out the sanders again

We can’t apply epoxy once the top coat goes on. Everything is fair game when working with base coat, but all of the woodwork has to be done before the top coat goes on.

Next day, lots of sanding

Mirka Abranet is great stuff. Very durable sandpaper

Time to clean up and get ready to spray

Notice the 12″ fume extractor exhaust hose coming in through the hatch opening? Normally, these fume extractors are set up to push air through the hose. That puffs the hose up, maximizing its diameter and the amount of air that can go through it with the least resistance. But there was no way I was going to put the big fan motor housing anywhere near the beautiful Awlgrip paintjob. So, I reversed the fan and put it outside. It sucks fumes from this space, narrowing the hose down to ~10″ along its length before the fumes go through the fan and get pushed into the filter box outside. Even with it reversed, it moves plenty of air out of the space. This is important, since you don’t want the spray filling up the space so the painter can’t see.

ICA top coat and catalyst

It’s spray time! ICA is smelly stuff, so once the exhaust fan is running, I packed up and went home. Next day, I came back to see how it looked.

Um…Houston…we have a problem

The white stuff you see in the pic above is overspray. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but the camera flash catches it very well. What I experienced in real life was seeing this absolutely gorgeous clear coated satin mahogany. But then I put my hand on it and it felt like 120 grit sandpaper. The last place the painter sprayed is as smooth as glass. Everywhere else is oversprayed.

The painter blamed it on the complex, tight spaces. He said the exhaust fan worked great. But he’d finish spraying the bulkhead, then move on to the closet walls. Then climb up on the bed and do the curved walls. Then climb down to finish off the desk-like structure at the entrance to the room. But the sprayed ICA was kicking off just enough before he could finish a lap that the overspray from the last area wasn’t melting in with the ICA sprayed initially. It’s a gorgeous nasty mess.

So…we needed to sand again, tape everything off again, buy more ICA, and spray…again.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Top Coating the V-berth II

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the Gorgeous Aft Stateroom Fascia Boards

The aft stateroom mahogany fascia boards went to the paint shop and came back finished with eight coats of ICA base clear and two of the matte top coat. They look great.

These look great!

The unpainted surfaces are the contact points where the boards will be epoxied to the ceiling framing.

The big aft board gets glued and clamped in place

Leave it to cure overnight

Next day, the side boards get glued and clamped

First, I wet out the bare wood with US Composites 635 epoxy resin, then I top it with generous dollops of the same epoxy thickened with wood flour.

Ceiling framing wetted out and coated with wood flour-thickened epoxy

Clamps in place and ready to grab the board

Looks good!

1″ x 1″ mahogany cleats help spread the clamping force

I use shrink wrap tape on the cleats so they don’t mark the pretty boards. I find that also helps eliminate ‘print through’ that can happen if the ICA top coat isn’t fully cured.

Nice, tight joint that’s also glued

Port side is next

That’s a pretty board

Next day, off come all the clamps

These turned out really nice!

Now that the fascia boards are installed, we’re almost ready to install the Whisper Wall headliner tracks.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the Last Aft Stateroom Overhead Filler Boards

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Salon Entryway Panel

Thanks to everybody who hit the tip jar! I really appreciate it!

Before we can spray the ICA top coat in the interior, I have to get the headliner installed. To install the headliner, there has to be a continuous surface all around the perimeter that the Whisper Wall headliner track can attach to. I’ve got most of the the continuous surface installed around the aft stateroom, then I shifted gears and worked on the salon headliner prep. In addition to having continuous surface to attach to, the headliner tracks also need to butt up against finished walls or fascia panels.

Problem: original salon entryway fascia board cracked in half

I considered gluing the board and reusing it, but it wasn’t salvageable

It’ll work great as a pattern, though.

A nice chunk of 4/4 mahogany pulled from the stack

First, I jointed the edge

Next, I jointed the faces

I love this MiniMax FS35 jointer. It’s got a relatively small footprint but can joint or plane boards up to 14″ wide. I wish I had it hooked to my dust collector, but the MiniMax is at home and the dust collectors are at the boat.

Back on the boat, trace the outline of the old board

 

Lop off the bottom on the EZ-One track saw table

Aft edge has an 88.5° angle

It’s a boat…nothing’s square.

Rounding the lower edges of the board

Nice!

Cutting the aft edge

Router finishes shaping the aft edge

Jigsaw worked well for the leading edge cuts

The new board looks a lot better than the original one

You can see in the above picture where a chunk of mahogany is missing from the original board. That helped nudge me into making a new one rather than gluing the old board back together.

Mark off the next cuts

Confirm the depth of cut on the track saw…need to drop it another 1/32″ or so

Start cutting away

One pass after another

Looks good!

Cleaned up with the router, then cut the next step

That’s looking pretty good!

Perfect fit on the first try!

It’s hard to see in the above picture, what with all of the protective plastic and blankets in place, but the new board is friction-fit to the salon entryway.

Nice little channel

There’s a 2-piece folding hatch for this entryway I’m making that will seal flush with the upper surface of this board.

Need to remove material and make space for the screen track

First, cut the upper and lower edges of the groove for the track

Multiple passes clear the track groove

Done!

You can see the two chunks of missing mahogany on the original board, one at the far left side (the top edge) and the other on the screen track. My new board will look great once it’s sprayed with ICA clear coat.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Salon Entryway Sliding Screen Tracks

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Final Coats of MS1 Clear Coat on the Toe Rail

We finally got a break from the roasting hot summer in the tent, so my painter showed up with a helper and covered the boat, taped off the mahogany toe rail, and sprayed what should have been the last coats of Imron MS1 clear coat.

Sharkskin plastic and a lot of 3M 233+ tape cover the boat

The (reportedly) good thing about MS1 clearcoat is that with eight coats sprayed in two sessions, it needs no maintenance for five years even in the brutally hot sun of southern Florida. Spraying can also produce a very flat surface with terrific shine. But it takes a lot of work to get ready to spray.

Sanded with 320 grit and ready for the final top coat

Ready to start spraying

Next day…looks pretty good

As I walked around the scaffolding, I noticed a lot of junk in the MS1. At the bow, I noticed that the painter hadn’t switched the air line to the filtered supply. There’s a small filter/bulk water separator before the refrigerated air drier. But I have a Tee in the air line, with a valve that controls air to two outlets, one of which has a big Devilbiss filter/drier. The filters are expensive, so we only use that side for painting. The other outlet is used for air tools and blowing things off. But even though I positioned the supply panel with the filter up on the scaffolding, the painter didn’t switch the supply to the filtered side. I’m pretty sure the little bits of junk in the MS1 came through the air line. There are also a few spots where the paint gun dripped. And I found four pinholes (roughly 1mm diameter) that appear to go all the way to the wood.

This is frustrating. It’s expensive to pay a professional crew to come in and spray. I can’t understand how they didn’t see the pinholes when they were sanding and taping off the toe rail. Swapping the air line is something the painter has done many times since we sprayed the boat with Awlgrip. He knows what he’s supposed to do, he just got careless and forgot. And now I’ve got junk in the clearcoat. The drips could be sanded and polished, but with the pinholes scattered around the toe rail, he’ll have to sand and spray once more.

It’s always something.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Back to the V-berth Cabinetry

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Spraying Mahogany Panels in the Origami Spray Booth

I’ve got a stack of mahogany plywood that needs to be sprayed with ICA base clear before I can install it on the boat. With the origami spray booth ready to go, we finally got to spray.

Goood day to spray

Mahogany plywood suspended for spraying

Fume extractor and filter box are ready to go

Devilbis Camair QC3 filter drier ensures clean, dry air from the compressor

My Boatamalan* painter was supposed to show up by 11, but he’s been very busy at work and didn’t get there until 5:30. I strung up some lights so he could spray even after dark. With the extra time, I suspended even more mahogany panels.

*Boatamalan: portmanteau indicating highly skilled boat workers of Central American origin. They’re actually from Honduras, but boat + [Guat]amalan has a nicer ring to it.

Spray water on the gravel to hold down dust…then get to spraying ICA

There’s about 150 pounds worth of plywood hanging from the roof. I noticed that as the weight and the length of time grew, the PVC pipes started sagging a bit. So I added some upright sticks to support the center and the end that meets the tent.

Fourth and final coat

Shiny!

Good lookin’ mahogany!

After moving all of the plywood back onboard the following morning, it was time to fold up the origami spray booth.

Pop off the roof, drop the wall…

Fold in the right wall…

Fold in the left wall…

Put the end wall in place…

Tie the roof in place…

And move the filter box up against the tent.

It only took about 25 minutes to button up the spray booth. Not bad for the first time. And it worked well. The base coat is nice and clean. Now I need to get those panels installed.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing the New Mahogany V-berth Bulkhead Panel