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: The Last Galley Pantry Panels

It warmed up for a few days, but over the weekend temps once again crashed below freezing. It’s snowing outside now and the Potomac River is still frozen over. But I did manage to get the last galley pantry panels cut before my kerosene heater ran out of fuel over the weekend. Gotta remember to bring a jerry can of kero next weekend!

Galley pantry #1

Pantry #2, with a big step down to the right, where pantry #3 needs to go

First, I built up the floor

Next I installed 1″ x 1″ mahogany cleats

The straight edge shows me where the plywood base panel should stick out to, so it aligns with all of the others.

Next, I put in the upright cleats that the back panel will attach to

It might seem easy, screwing sticks to plywood panels. But the thing is, nothing is square here…so nothing is easy. If I just made square or rectangular box cabinets, like you’d see in a house, it would be easy. I could even buy them pre-made at a big box retailer. BUT, I’d lose relatively huge amounts of storage space that the missus tells me is essential. To maximize storage, I’m trying to keep the back panels as close to the hull as possible. The hull is curved here, so the cabinet depth varies from side-to-side and top-to-bottom. The cleats need to be installed just so AND they have to be cut on a bevel, otherwise the plywood panels won’t lie flat on them. I’m sure it’d be easy for a pro, but you’d be surprised how long it takes for a weekend woodworker like me to get eight cleats attached in the right spots.

Bottom panel fits well

That one little tiny panel took me 30 minutes to cut and fit.

45 minutes later, the back panel fits pretty good

Getting the top panel cleats installed took another hour

Though you normally wouldn’t use a level on a boat that’s floating, I can use a level for cabinetmaking because I check the level of the whole boat about once a year. Once the floors are level, everything built on the floors can be checked for level, too.

Upper cleats are dry fitted

In the pic above, it looks like the cleats are part of an M.C. Escher print. But, in fact, the bottom surfaces of the sticks are all on the same plane.

30 minutes later, the upper panel is close to fitting

After a few more slices, it fits pretty good!

I just need to bevel the back edge a bit to close that joint

I’ve used my Shopsmith jointer before to bevel plywood panels

Unfortunately, the HHS jointer blades Shopsmith requires don’t hold up when jointing plywood edges

The jointer blades held up well enough to finish the panel. And since that was the last of the pantry panels to fit, the next step was to disassemble the whole thing and take the panels in for refinishing someplace warm.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: The Flagship Marine Air Conditioners Have Arrived

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