1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Sanding and Spraying the Top Coat on the Mahogany Panels

The V-berth and aft stateroom mahogany panels are looking very nice. Things sure go faster when my schedule aligns with my Boatamalan* painter. I might actually have the portholes installed soon!

*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.

Final sanding with 320 grit Abranet

The second round of ICA base clear went on nice and flat, which makes for easy final sanding. But this mahogany has some deep grain that makes it tough to fill it entirely. The strange thing is that the grain is deep on some panels but flat on others, even when the panels were cut from the same sheet of plywood. Nature apparently doesn’t have a robust Quality Control department.

I sand the faces with the Mirka Ceros sander, then hit the edges with a hand sanding block

The transom cabinetry

Sand it smooth, but don’t go too far

The deep grain I mentioned makes it challenging to get the sanding just right. Don’t go far enough, and the grain makes a surface that’s not perfectly smooth. Go too far, and you can sand through the base coat. Fortunately, I didn’t breach the base coat anywhere.

Sanded just enough, but with some pinhole and grain depressions left behind

Dust fills the pinhole and grain depressions

Full air blast takes a long time to clear the dust

It was taking a long time to blow the dust out of the little depressions that remain. So I used some lint-free microfiber towels to lightly wipe each panel while blowing it with air. That approach worked a lot better, instantly clearing all of the dust from the depressions.

A cluster of little depressions along an edge

Different panel cut from the same plywood

It’s the darndest thing: not a single pinhole or grain depression on the entire panel

Air blast + microfiber cloth = no dust

Perfect conditions…time to spray

ICA semi-matte top coat is very nice

30 minutes after two top coats were applied, it’s dry to the touch

I very carefully moved the panels inside the tent

Finding safe places to put all of these finished panels was a bit of a challenge. I’ll leave them to cure for a week, so I can’t stack them like I did when they were unfinished. I eventually found enough flat spaces on the boat to lay them all out, then carefully stepped off the boat. Next I’ll insulate the back side of all of the panels with Buffalo Batt woven fabric. Then I’ll start installing the panels into their final resting places. But before that, I’ll install the V-berth panels that only got base coated. I’m stoked!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Insulating Mahogany Wall Panels

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Sanding and Spraying the 2nd Coat on the Mahogany Panels

The good news is that I’m finally making progress on getting mahogany plywood clear coated. The bad news is that, realistically, there’s no way I’m going to splash the boat this year. I’m OK with that. Life gets in the way sometimes…gotta just roll with it and keep an eye on the prize.

Start the day sanding

The panels in the pic above are for the laundry, storage, and clothes closets on the port side of the aft stateroom.

Pretty mahogany

More porthole surround panels

I like that Mirka Ceros sander. It’s super light–about the same as an air sander–but uses a DC brushless motor.

Back panels for the V-berth head cabinet

Sanded and wiped down…ready for the second base coat

Slight modification to the filter box

The filter material was being hit directly with the air flow from the extractor fan hose, causing the center of the filter to get coated and clogged up with the thick ICA base coat clear. So I put a piece of scrap 1/4″ luan in as a deflector baffle. Hopefully, the ICA will stick to the inside of the box and disperse out across the face of the filter material now instead of concentrating in the middle.

Time to spray

Next morning…good lookin’ base coat!

Pretty panel

I like that little cabinet panel. Unfortunately, it’ll almost never be seen since it’s the back panel for the toilet paper storage cabinet in the V-berth head.

The painter really flowed out the ICA base coat nicely

I had two loads of mahogany to be base coated. So with the first load done, I sanded the second load and hung the panels in the origami spray booth. The painter came and sprayed at the end of the day. The following morning, the panels were ready to come out of the booth for one more round of sanding with 320 grit.

V-berth wall panels with 8 coats of ICA base coat clear

Very pretty mahogany

Transom cabinet panels look good

All of the panels got four coats of ICA base, followed by sanding with 240 grit to a smooth finish. We just applied four more coats of base, and everything is looking good.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Final Sanding and Spraying the Top Coat on the Mahogany Panels

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Spraying Mahogany Panels with ICA Base Coat Clear

Finally, at long last, I got the mahogany plywood that’s been cut and fitted since March into the origami spray booth for coating with ICA clear coat.

Houston…WTF

I came back to the boatyard to find that a trailered sailboat had been moved onto the new patch of gravel next to my tent. Unfortunately, there’s not much room between the sailboat and the origami spray booth. Now my first priority is moving the booth.

Relocate the spray booth 10′ forward of where it was

Relocated and ready to hang panels

Unfortunately, the time it took to move the booth delayed hanging the panels. By the time I got finished hanging them, it was too late to spray…have to delay until the next morning.

The following morning, water drips on the wood

A passing shower caused rain to drip around the perimeter of the tent, where the water just happened to drop on the string that’s suspending a few panels. It ran down the string and made the wood damp…can’t spray until that dries completely.

Finally, ready to spray as evening approaches

The first four coats look good!

I’ll leave it to dry overnight

Good looking mahogany!

Transom window surround panels look great!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Sanding and Spraying the 2nd Coat on the Mahogany Panels

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Sanding and Finishing the V-berth Head Moldings

With the moldings cut for the V-berth head, next I had to sand them and send them off to the paint shop to be coated with ICA base coat clear, then finished with ICA top coat clear. It’s still hot and humid in the Mid-Atlantic region, which isn’t helping the project move along. But even fits and starts are still moving forward.

Moldings ready for sanding

My super-fancy molding sanding jig

Sanding two or three sides of delicate moldings is hard to do on a table without dinging the sanded edges and faces. This jig keeps the easily damaged visible parts scuff and scratch free. After sanding from 120, 240 and then 320 grit, the moldings are ready for the paint shop.

Pretty!

The fiberglassed and faired panel on top will be framed with molding

The Throne Room

First, square up the cabinet openings

I used a 4-1/2″ grinder and my Harbor Freight multi-tool to square up the fiberglass around the cabinet openings. The fiberglassed and faired panel will fit snugly in this opening, and the mahogany moldings will cover the joint.

Houston, we have a problem

I found a small spot where the fiberglass had separated from the plywood. We’ll have to break that open, wet it out real good, and backfill with wood flour-thickened epoxy, then fair again and apply Awlquick before I can finish up the molding installation. And because I can only work on weekends, that means another week will pass before the painter can get in here and finish up.

Dang it!

So I kept cutting and fitting moldings for the other cabinet opening.

Next up…the TP storage cabinet.

That’s looking pretty good…dusty, but good

Almost ready for glue-up

Houston…WTF?

I found another spot where the fiberglass had pulled away from the plywood before the epoxy cured. Unfortunately, the Boatamalans didn’t spot these areas when they were fairing. That would have saved a lot of time. So now I’m waiting for them to repair these areas, then I’ll come back and get the moldings installed so they can continue with primer and paint. In the meantime, there’s plenty of other things going on.

Especially…shiny things. 🙂

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: More Chrome!

1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: New Galley Plywood Panels

With the salon stained and varnished and that galley board made pretty and installed, next I had to make, varnish, and install mahogany plywood panels to replace the rotten stuff around the galley windows.

As found in 2007

Rotten angled plywood between side and bow seat windows

The angled plywood panels on both sides of the galley were rotten from leaking bow seat windows.

Starboard panel removed in 2008

I didn’t save the old panels, which would have made good patterns. No problem, though, because I’ve got a Eureka Zone EZ-One woodworking center that makes cutting perfect angles on ply a breeze.

Cutting the panels on my EZ-One

Measuring and marking the panel took longer than the actual set-up and cutting with the EZ-One. Given the space I have to work in, there’s no way I could have done this with a table saw. The first panel needed a fraction of a degree of additional material cut from the angle. No problem–just put the panel under the track guide edge and position it so the saw cuts nothing on one end and 1/16″ at the far end of the cut. Set-up and the cut itself took less than a minute. Try that with a conventional table or panel saw!

New plywood panels (fore and background) stained and ready for ICA base coat clear

Removing old bonding compound and roughing up the surface for the new panel

Rough up the primer on the original backing blocks

Using Buffalo Batt scraps to insulate the backside of the panel

Buffalo Batts provide the biggest “bang for the buck” when it comes to insulation that’s appropriate for the humid marine environment. I put the Buffalo Batt scraps on the panel in the pic above after coating the back with epoxy, yielding R3 insulation on the backside of the panels. The ICA clear on the face of the panel was already cured.

Wood flour-thickened epoxy coats the backing blocks and panel edges

Chris Craft used bungs to cover screw holes that held their interiors together, but I’m trying to avoid bungs wherever possible. Like most new boats, this panel will be just glued in place with epoxy.

Fitted and clamped in place

The new wood isn’t quite a perfect match to the 1968-era mahogany, but with the Pettit 1095p stain it’s pretty close.

Samsung custom panel clamp

That refrigerator has been a pain in the but ever since I moved it aboard after I got the paperwork SNAFU resolved back in 2012. It came in through the salon roof hatch hole on the same “crane day” as the Cummins 6CTAs and the washer and dryer that are in the aft stateroom, and the fridge has been in the way ever since. It was nice to finally have a use for the thing!

24 hours later, epoxy’s cured and clamps are off

I’ve got the starboard side mahogany panel ready to install, but some other things are calling for my attention. Motion Windows tells me my helm station windows are on the way, and winter is coming so it’s time to get the window frame installed. Also, I need to install the port engine before it gets too cold.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Installing the New Helm Windshield Frame

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: A Mahogany Board Gets Pretty

We’ve been making lots of progress in recent years on this massive Chris Craft Roamer 46 refit project, and most articles I write tend to cover big stuff–sandblasting the hull inside and out, building the aft enclosure, making the salon roof bulletproof, installing an engine, or (recently) making the salon pretty. But every once in a while I like to focus in on some of the detail work and useful trivia–the moldings, more moldings, the occasional shout out for cool tools, and tools of the trade. So with all of the recent focus on big jobs (like the salon mahogany), I wanted to zoom in on the transformation of just one mahogany board.

As found, circa 2007

It didn’t look too bad at first–just needs to be cleaned up, strip the wood, a couple of coats of varnish and she’ll be good as new.

Or not.

On the right side of the picture above, just below the bow seat windows, there’s a spot of rotten bulkhead from where the window leaked. As we dug into it, we found the rot went all the way across. The original design of the bow seat windows was destined to fail and take out the wood below. But the solid mahogany board below the side windows in the galley…that was a keeper.

Out with the rotten wood, and the project grew

Rotten plywood and cabinets all removed

With the rotten plywood and cabinets gone, it was clear that one mahogany board was solid. It was also clear that the whole galley bulkhead needed replacing in order to turn the interior concepts I came up with during the paperwork SNAFU into reality.

The project grew still bigger, and the board was removed

After removal, the board sat in the lumber stack awaiting its time.

Fast forward to September 2014

While the salon got sanded, stained, and clear coated, we gave the same treatment to lots of moldings, fascia boards, and other smaller pieces. The galley board also got hauled out of the lumber stack.

The old board fits up against the new galley bulkhead pretty well.

Fits just like before, and that wood has great potential

The original bonding material is still stuck to the back-side of the board and the cabin sides. Once I grind that off, the board will fit much better.

The fit at the front isn’t perfect, but it’ll do

The leading edge of the board will be mostly hidden inside of cabinets, like the original layout. Plus, I’ll be gluing and screwing the board in place; the wood flour-thickened epoxy will fill the gap between the board and the bulkhead.

Original bonding material isn’t rock-hard

I don’t know what Chris Craft used to bond wood to fiberglass back in the day, but it definitely wasn’t anything like modern epoxies. The grey stuff is hard and sands well, but if you pry off the big blobs they bend like soft plastic before breaking. It’s not rock-hard like epoxy.

First cut clean-up with 36 grit on the Makita sander looks good

That dark stain on the salon end of the board will take some work to make it go away

Chris Craft’s thick, white primer came off nicely, too

The remaining white primer will come off as we sand with 120 and 220, before we hit it with 320 grit and stain.

Test fit looks good

Much better fit at the salon end with the OE bonding material out of the way

But there’s a fit problem in the galley

In the pic above, the board is seated against the bottom of the upright cleat, which is sticking out proud of the piece of wood at the bottom. Nice fit Chris Craft! 🙂

Scribe a straight line

Need to knock off ~1/8″ from the bottom

The big, ugly galley board got pretty!

We stained the board and sprayed it with ICA base coat clear along with all of the rest of the trim pieces.

Sprayed with ICA clear–right side, all the way at the bottom

While the ICA cured, I prepped the fiberglass

Good lookin’ board!

Buffalo Batts provide R3 insulation

I really like working with this Buffalo Batt fabric insulation. It’s easy to handle, takes glue well, and you don’t get bits and pieces of itchy stuff falling off of it like you do with fiberglass. Plus, it’s cheap and doesn’t absorb water like fiberglass batts. Best bang for the buck of all the insulating materials I looked into.

Insulation is fitted; time for glue

Heavy coat of wood flour-thickened epoxy on the fiberglass

Wet out the contact points on the back of the board

Chris Craft didn’t coat the back-side of big pieces of wood like this one, though they did coat just about every other piece of mahogany used for framing. My theory is that not coating the wood permits moisture in through the back side, which can cause the varnish on the face to come loose, especially at the edges. So we gave the back-side of the board a few good, heavy coats of ICA. I ground the ICA back to bare wood at the contact points, so there will be a good epoxy bond all the way around.

Glued, screwed, and clamped in place

The epoxy that squeezes out cleans up with a squeegee and alcohol on a rag.

Good lookin’ board!

Fully clamped and waiting for the epoxy to cure

Insulation doing exactly what I’d hoped it would do

I can’t wait to unclamp the board and see how it looks. Then, I’ve got to install new plywood above the board to replace the rotten stuff we removed back in 2009 when the refit began.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: New Galley Plywood Panels

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Making the Salon Steps Pretty

With the salon mahogany stained and varnished with ICA base coat clear, then sanded again and topped with two more coats (total of 8), I covered everything with single flute cardboard. While all of that was going on, I was also working on making the salon steps pretty. This was a challenge because:

1. this ghost ship was a mess when we found her;
2. the boat had carpeting on the steps way back when she was new that was held in place by a gazzillion staples; and
3. during the refit, we didn’t take especially good care of the mahogany steps since they were already ugly.

Still, the more I looked at the wood the more I thought the steps might clean up pretty well. I got even more optimistic when I saw how well the salon wood had turned out. So in the quiet times, like when the Pettit 1095p stain was drying, I got out my pliers, prying tools, and picks and got to work removing all of those damned staples and ring nails. Then I filled all of the holes with epoxy thickened with wood flour, which made me very, very dubious about how it was going to look in the end. But then we sanded and stained it with the same Pettit 1095p. It’s not perfect, but compared to what I started with, it isn’t too darned shabby.

The salon steps in 2007, when the refit began

Somebody had already come along and ripped out the carpeting, leaving behind stringy tatters of the original stuff and a TON of freakin’ staples.

September 2015: looking worse for wear

Pretty pathetic…but are they beyond help?

After a few hours with a sander they’re looking pretty good…from a distance

But up close…not so pretty

There’s a combination of staples, staple holes where the staples had come out cleanly with the carpet, plus ring nail holes and the occasional pitting and discoloration from water damage. This was, after all, right under the place where the salon roof hatch had failed sometime between 1985, when the boat first entered Purgatory Row in the Southern Maryland boatyard, and 2007 when we found her. That was a lot of time for the elements to do their dirty work.

3 kinds of staples, and all of them suck

(cue What Kinda Gone) There are “good and gone” staples, which pulled out of the steps when the carpet was removed. While it’s a good thing they didn’t put up too much of a fight, they leave holes behind. Another category of staple is the ones that ain’t gone yet and don’t plan to get that way anytime soon. They’re sunk deep, but they’ll be “long gone” after putting up a fight. The last category are rotten staples that break off, leaving all of the scars of the other two categories of staples, plus you have to fight to remove the bits that are left in the wood. I thought I could get away with leaving a few behind, but they have to come out or the steel shines right up when it gets sanded. Plus, because steel is so much harder than wood or varnish, when you sand it smooth the pointy ends of the staples always poke through. These are skin-ripping buggers that have got to go.

Staple infestation

In the picture above, there are 26 staples and/or holes in this one little section of one corner of one step.

Tools of the staple-pickin’ trade

Best work light ever

I picked this Snap-on branded LED worklight over the summer, since halogen lights put out way too much heat and the tent is already miserably hot in July. $39 at Costco and the light output is blindingly bright white, which makes it perfect for spotting itty bitty little broken off bits of staples. This is a great addition to my tool collection, and I highly recommend them.

Angled pick makes a dimple under the staple

Note how the staple in the picture above isn’t shiny steel. That’s because it’s buried so deep in the wood that the top surface is still below the surface of the surrounding mahogany, so the sandpaper that stripped the wood never touched it.

Sharp-edged scraper protects the wood from dents

Staple’s gone but not in a good way

Though it’s good that it came out with out breaking and leaving the two micro-spikes in the wood, it actually looks worse than when the staple was there. Now I’ve got two holes and a long, deep dent between them. That ain’t gonna sand out.

5 hours later, staple holes got filled

I used  epoxy thickened with mahogany wood flour to fill the holes, then hit the whole thing with the sander once the epoxy had cured. I wasn’t optimistic about how that was going to turn out.

I’ve seen worse, but I’ve also seen much, much better

At this point, I was thinking the steps looked better with the staples left in them. So I hit them with the same Pettit 1095P mahogany filler paste stain that I used on the salon walls.

Hey! That’s not half bad! Especially compared to what I started with!

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Making the Aft Stateroom Steps Pretty

 

1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Wrapping up the Base Coat Varnish in the Salon

With six coats of ICA base coat clear sprayed in the salon and on the salon trim, next we sanded it all with 320 grit and sprayed another two heavy coats. ICA is a base coat/top coat application, so the purpose of these heavy base coats is to seal up and protect the wood. If we happen to scratch the base coat it’s OK, since we’ll sand it all again and spray the final top coat once all of the interior work is done.

When last we saw the salon mahogany, it had 6 coats of ICA

Galley cabinet

320 grit knocks off the orange peel

The grain is deep in the old mahogany plywood

That wraps up one lap of the salon with sandpaper

Time to clean up and get ready to spray.

Oxidation stains have vanished from the salon cabinets

Once we got it all cleaned up, we fired up the compressor, suited up, cranked up the exhaust fans. It was too late for pix, but the next time I came to the boat it looked like this:

Shiny!

Time for a little “before & after.”

Circa 2007

Circa October 2015

Starboard side galley will look much better with all of the panels installed

That’s some beautiful old mahogany

I was tempted to rip out the old cabinets and redo it from new, in part, because Chris Craft used sharp corners on their old cruiser cabinetry and I like the rounded corners that I’m using in the aft stateroom. But now that I see how the old wood turned out, I’m glad I kept it.

Galley cabinets will look better with all of the doors and chrome hardware installed

With all of the salon wood nice and pretty, now I need to keep it that way. Time to break out the single flute cardboard roll and masking tape.

The salon steps have their own transformational story to tell

I mentioned that I was using a different approach for the salon steps, since they will see very heavy service compared to cabinets and walls. So, that’s what’s up…

Next in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Making the Salon Steps Pretty.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Spraying ICA Base Coat Clear in the Salon

The salon got sanded and stained last month, and we knocked out the sanding and staining of trim pieces, doors, etc last week. Next we took advantage of a warm afternoon and got three coats of ICA base coat clear sprayed on the trim and 6 coats on all of the salon panels.

Lotsa ICA base and top coat clear

The upside to spraying the varnish is that you can do multiple coats all in one go. The downside to it is that the money you save in labor sanding between brush-applied varnish goes out the exhaust fans with all of the overspray.

Ready to spray

First coat of ICA

Second coat

Third coat and done

My aft deck spray booth leaves something to be desired. It’s just too tight in there, but fortunately this is the last spraying we’ll do out back. After letting the ICA tack off, we moved the exhaust fan to the salon door and knocked out 6 coats inside.

Beautiful mahogany!

Always nice to see a before and after shot.

Circa 2007

Note the gold veined mirror above the steps to the aft stateroom, which covers the mahogany panel in the pictures from 2015 below.

Stripped to beautiful bare mahogany

What look like stains on the left side are just shadows

After snapping off some pictures, we got out of the tent to let the ICA cure. We’ll come back in a couple of days, sand it smooth with 320, then hit it again with two more coats of base coat clear.

Next up on our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: Wrapping up the Base Coat Varnish in the Salon

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Prepping the Salon Trim for Varnish

With the salon panels stained, next we had to sand and stain all of the trim pieces.

The salon door will clean up nicely, but all of those inside corners are a pain

Helm windshield panels will get sanded and stained, too

Lots o’ trim parts

And still more trim parts

Staining with Pettit 1095P Original Mahogany paste filler stain

It took lots of “wipe on, wipe off” to get all of these pieces stained.

With everything stained, next we hung the trim pieces in my makeshift spray booth (AKA the aft deck, with lots of plastic masking film taped everywhere and big extractor fans waiting to go).

The stain needs to cure for 24 hours before spraying them with ICA base coat clear.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Spraying ICA Base Coat Clear in the Salon