1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Helm Door Frames in Heavy Mahogany

First off, thank you so much for the donations to the tip jar! Every little bit helps and I really appreciate your contributions, especially with this pandemic hysteria that’s tanked the economy.

That said, I’m cutting up the last of my really big mahogany lumber today.

15′ x 7-1/2″ of 8/4 mahogany

I’m going to turn this into two heavy helm station door frames…well, the forward upright timbers of the door frames, anyway.

Getting set up to cut a bit off a split end

Next I split the board

I’m all giddy!

I loaded the two boards into my truck and took them back to my home shop for jointing.

My MiniMax FS35 jointer will have no problem jointing these boards clean and straight

Ummm…Houston, we have a problem.

Way back in 2017, I bought myself a MiniMax FS35 Jointer/Planer because I knew I’d be machining lots of rough-cut mahogany lumber as part of the interior refit. The MiniMax is a great machine, with a 220v 3hp motor and 14″ cutter head. It worked great for jointing those gorgeous aft stateroom valence panels, the helm windshield and side window opening lumber, and the very nice helm radio box.

But sometime between November 2019, when I last used it, and now, something went haywire in the beast. I got all ready to pass a board through, hit the Start button, and all it did was hum. The cutter head turned maybe one very slow revolution before I hit STOP. I checked the breaker, hit the Reset button, all to now avail. Confirmed 220v at the plug. It’s got what looks like the original start or run capacitor on it, and though the capacitor case didn’t show signs of trouble, it sure seemed like it was the most likely cause of the trouble.

That’s a funny looking capacitor

Leave it to the Italians to go with non-standard gear on their fancy machines. Also, note the somewhat crunchy appearance of the wires and loom. I believe this is the problem.

There’s no sign the smoke got let out of this one

But there aren’t any marks on the capacitor indicating its rating

My MiniMax is an Italian machine from the mid-80s, so there’s very little information about them online. I had a 370v 220 microfarad AC compressor start capacitor and figured I’d give that a shot. After wiring it up, I hit the GO button….and she started! But judging from the sound, the cutter head was only turning at around half its usual RPM. As I went to shut it down, there was a POP! and all the smoke got let out of the start capacitor.

Must have been some stale smoke, because it really stunk.

After opening the big shop doors and ventilating the space, I recognized my own limitations and decided not to guess anymore on what size capacitor I needed. I removed the motor from the machine and took it to Wenger’s Motor Service in Mechanicsville, MD.

Let me tell you, the engineers who packed a lot of big board jointing capacity into this relatively small footprint did an admirable job. The downside is that servicing the machine (e.g. removing the motor) is not a task easily done by a normal sized American with only one elbow and one wrist joint on each arm.

The following morning, Wenger’s called to tell me the motor was ready. After $37 and another drive through Amish country, and I was back at the woodshop.

The Southern Maryland zip tie approach isn’t as elegantly executed as the original Italian, but it works

Also, note that the MiniMax comes originally with an isolation transformer (the grey box to the right of the motor, presumably to stabilize voltage input to the motor across the European market, where quantity and quality of line voltage may vary from country to country. I doubt it’s really necessary in the US, and it absolutely complicates R&R motor service, but I decided not to experiment and just reinstalled it with the motor.

Back in business!

If anybody’s interested, the mid-80s yellow MiniMax FS35 uses an rd-40-370 run capacitor.

With my jointer woes resolved, I got to jointing the big mahogany bits. Caution: wood porn ahead.

Two passes on each face, and that mahogany cleaned up real nice

Both boards are jointed

I have a dust collection system in the Roamer tent that I wish I had here at the house, especially when using the MiniMax. But the fact of the matter is, I need it more at the tent and I don’t need two of them.

That’s two stacked 6′ 5″ long boards, jointed smooth enough you can hardly see where one begins and the other ends

Back at the boat, I ran the boards through my Dewalt thickness planer to exactly 2″ thick

That’s the idea!

The starboard side board will cover the wire chase/hardtop support and form the forward pocket for the sliding door

I hope my text explanations of what I have in mind make sense. I can see how it’ll turn out in my head, but putting that into words is sometimes difficult.

Cut to exact length

I cut the boards so they just fit with a light push into position from the teak deck up to the big overhead mahogany pieces that run along the top of the window and door frames.

Nice fit to the zigzag floor boxes, too

When I took these pictures, I hadn’t varnished the zigzag boxes yet.

Next, I used my Bosch router to radius the inner corners

Nice!

Before I install these door frame timbers, I’ll coat them with ICA base clear. But since that stuff is super stinky, first I’ll make the mahogany filler pieces for the transom step-through and a few more bits to wrap up the woodwork on the aft deck.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Aft Deck Transom Mahogany Panels

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Resawing Big Mahogany Boards

With the salon, V-berth, and aft stateroom headliners installed, the last space on the boat that needs Whisper Wall is the aft deck. As you know from the earlier posts, before the headliner track can be installed, the surfaces next to the headliner have to be pretty much finished and done. There’s some ugliness that desperately needs covering on the aft deck, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than with some solid mahogany stock. Fortunately, I’ve had a pile of rough cut mahogany boards stickered under the boat since…gad…it’s been ten years!

8/4 B-grade mahogany planks have been sitting under the boat since 2009

At a buck per foot, I couldn’t pass up a load of 8/4 mahogany boards, even if they were B-grade. There was some obvious fall-damage to these two boards, where the tree fractured  when it was brought down, but there’s plenty of material to work with so I’m pretty sure it’ll still work out to be a bargain even if some of the chunks aren’t going to be useful on this refit. At 13 and 14-feet respectively, they were a bit of a challenge moving to Weaver Boatworks with my little pickup. Mr. Weaver graciously agreed to run my lumber through his resaw machine.

What a difference the right tool makes

Board 1 is ready to go

Board 2 is next

8/4 board split in two

Wood porn on public display back at the boatyard

Dang…that’s some pretty lumber

Nice grain…too bad it’s split lengthwise here

The boards are wide enough that even where it’s split, there’s still good lumber that can be salvaged from it.

Sweet grain here

Too bad that eye has a crack through it

It’s still pretty stuff

This part’s a hot mess

But again, that’s two inches of cracked wood on a 12″ board that’ll make somebody nice turning stock. That means there’s ten usable inches worth of board.

That’s what I’m talkin’ about

This end looks very nice

Chop everything up into useful pieces

Six feet of beautiful but cracked mahogany

If I was into making music boxes or wooden pens, this would be a great find. But this cracked 6′ board doesn’t have a place on this boat right now. Maybe it’ll be useful somewhere else, so I’ll put it back in the wood pile without more machining.

That’s a shame, but it’ll come in handy somewhere

Back in the woodshop, I ran the boards through my MiniMax FS35 jointer

That cleaned up real nice

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: V-berth Bed Surround Padded Headliner

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Resawing Big Mahogany Boards

I’ve been working for a while now on the next step in the process of spraying the ICA top coat clear in the interior: installing the headliner. I know…it makes no sense, but it is what it is. I’ve got all of the support panels installed around the aft stateroom that the Whisper Wall tracks will attach to. The last thing I need to do is make and install some mahogany fascia panels that go above the aft stateroom portholes. Chris Craft used mahogany boards, too, but they painted them white. And the primer they used goes so deep into the wood that I can’t remove it all without removing enough material to make a 1/2″ thick board 3/8″, which would not be a very robust fascia board. So I’m going to make new fascia panels. I’ve had some big mahogany boards sitting in the stack for ten years, and I knew someday they’d come in handy. Today’s the day!

The smaller mahogany stash

I’ve got an 8/4 rough cut board stash under the boat. I put the thinner, 4/4 and 5/4 finer cut boards under the stairs and scaffolding at the back of the boat.

Going to the big woodshop nearby

These boards are leftover moldings from a golf club contractor job that I bought off craigslist a decade ago. They’re 1-1/8″ thick, and I need to have them resawn down to 5/8″. After I send them through my jointer, the final thickness should be 1/2″, which is the size I need for the new fascia panels.

Awaiting the big saw

I wish my own woodshop was this big!

Going through the resaw machine

Sorry for the fuzzy pic, but my phone was all I had on me. This big resaw machine has a power feed table. It split this 12-foot board in about five seconds.

Resawn mahogany boards back at the boatyard

I’m sure the leftover molding planks will come in handy somewhere…but that’s for another day.

Old fascia panel on a new board

You can see that stripper left a lot of white primer deep in the grain

Unlike Chris Craft, I don’t intend to have white fascia panels. Clear coated mahogany ones should look much better.

The backside of the original fascia shows pretty, unpainted grain

I don’t know what Chris Craft was thinking, painting that white!

Back at my own tiny wood shop

These are big boards that need to be jointed. I’ve got a big MiniMax FS35 jointer that can handle 14″ wide boards, but these ones are too long for my shop!

First, I had to make in-feed and out-feed tables in the same plane as the jointer

Finally! Jointing the boards!

I’ve never messed with boards this long. To keep constant pressure on the boards as they pass over the jointer cutter head, I used cork sheets to create friction and a long push stick. It ended up working pretty well. The boards are jointed and ready to go back to the Roamer, where I’ll finish turning them into fascia boards.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Making the Aft Center Fascia Board

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: A New Tool–MiniMax FS35 Jointer/Planer!

The more cabinetry I do, the more I’m realizing the limitations of my Shopsmith combination woodworking machine. While the Shopsmith bandsaw, 12″ disk sander, and horizontal boring and shaping functions are excellent, the jointer–at only 4″ wide, with a 28″ table–is simply too small for the job. I’ve been scanning craigslist for months and missed a couple of good machines, but then a MiniMax FS35–a beast of a combination 14″ jointer and thickness planer–showed up in Baltimore during the week before Christmas. The seller wasn’t especially good at communication, and it seemed as if it had sold…then it was still available, but only for the full asking price…then there was flexibility in the price. By Saturday morning, the eve of Christmas Eve, I’d already made the trip from the house to the boatyard when the seller sent me his address. The heater on the boat had just started warming up the salon when I shut it all down and hit the road for Baltimore. I ended up buying the MiniMax, loading it into my truck, and taking it down to my house in Southern Maryland. For the second time in two months, a whole weekend went by without anything getting done on the Roamer. But this machine will make it that much easier to do cabinet face frames in the near future.

800lbs of fun

Because it was unclear if the machine was still for sale, I’d left the house for the boatyard without bring straps or a cover. Fortunately, I’ve always got 1/2″ and 3/4″ line in the back of the truck. The seller had a loading dock, which is ~50″ high–14″ higher than my unloaded truck bed– so we “went Egyptian” and used scraps of lumber and plywood to make a ramp to slide the machine into the truck. The loading operation went surprisingly smoothly.

Taking heavy bits off the top

I used my engine hoist to lift the planer beds off the machine, one by one.

Both jointer beds off

That 14″ cutterhead is the biggest I’ve ever seen. With the jointer table in place, you can true up to 13-3/4″ wide solid stock from the top side (Model FS35 = 35cm =13.75″). The thickness planer bed is below the cutter head, and it can handle lumber up to 9-1/2″ thick. This is a beast of a machine.

The paint’s not in bad shape for an old machine

Planer feed roller drive wheel has a dent where it was left engaged

Fortunately, the dent in the rubber drive wheel doesn’t seem to affect the feed roller function.

Time for the big lift out of the truck bed

My Harbor Freight engine hoist has been one of the greatest tools I’ve bought from them. Well worth the money.

After lifting the MiniMax out of the truck, I had to decide how to get it into the workshop. If I go through the garage, there’s a big step down into the workshop out back, which would mean more ramp building. Instead, I decided to load it onto a mini trailer and pull it around back with my Craftsman garden tractor. First gear at idle speed, and within a couple of minutes it was in the shop.

Reassembled in my workshop

10 seconds to convert from jointer to planer

Brand new carbide-tipped knives

So, now I’ve got a machine big enough to joint the boards I’ll be using for upcoming cabinetry. Because the MiniMax is down at my house, I’ll have to cut lengths of mahogany lumber slightly oversize for whatever I’m going to make, bring them from the tent to the house, joint and plane to thickness, then finish up machining the wood back on the boat. I predict there will be some frustration along the way, but not nearly as much as trying to use the little 4″ Shopsmith jointer with its tiny little bed and fence.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: More on the Galley Pantry