1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Fairing the Cabin Top

A potential buyer popped up for the Ford Lehman engines I had rebuilt for the Roamer back in 2008 before getting my wits about me and deciding on Cummins 450 Diamonds. So I spent two days over the weekend moving big pieces of iron around the State of Maryland, getting them back to the shop that did the rebuild for a quick check up in preparation for some videos.  On Sunday, the Boatamalans came by with their 30″ longboards and attacked the fairing compound we laid on the cabin top last week. While the guys were sanding away, I was out working on transforming Tent Model IX from a hurricane-tested winter work tent to a paint shed.

The dashboard is cleaning up nicely.

I decided to make the instrument pod part of the dashboard structure since the instruments have excellent access from below and there’s no benefit I can see in having it screwed together from below with an exposed seam above. All the joint between the two does is grab dirt. Once the dashboard is faired, we’ll put a nice fillet over the joint between the two after tabbing them together with lightweight fiberglass.

The bullet-proof windshield base.

There’s just a very fine line of yellow at the top of the windshield base to indicate there’s Kevlar bi-axial cloth below.

The previous repair area at the base of the windshield has been properly re-repaired.

Very little fairing compound was needed here, which is good since additional thickness here would increase the challenge of reattaching and bedding the windshield frame.

Shaping the starboard windshield base.
Everything looks very good here.

Process basics: apply expensive fairing compound to the surface, then sand most of it off!

The 30″ longboards are very good at finding the high and low spots in the fairing compound. Most of the dark lines here are where there were overlaps in the 1708 bi-axial fiberglass layer, creating high spots. Others, though, are high spots from where the original hard top shape simply wasn’t fair.

It’s anybody’s guess whether it was that way when new or if the wrinkly bits were caused by the monster Super Seamaster engines wracking the superstructure by bashing along at much faster than original design speeds.

Some of the original frames create high spots in the salon top roof.

Once it’s faired to this point, the fairing compound filling the low spots isn’t especially thick.

Salon roof frames create high spots all the way across the cabin top even far forward of the salon hatch roof repair.

The guys are doing a good job making the cabin top lines straight.

They faired the turn of the cabin top to the cabin top sides to a very sharp edge. We applied the second coat of fairing compound to the low spots and will do the final fairing next weekend. Once that’s straight and all of the low spots are gone, we’ll come back through and put a nice radius on it.

Nice radius on the brow.

This is a subtle styling spot on the bigger Chris Craft cruisers, but it’s notorious for developing cracks and pocks in the gelcoat. The guys did a great job reproducing and blending in the radius at the brow on the leading edge of the cabin top, now vastly improved with a continuous layer of 1708 bi-axial FRP.

Ditto on the port side.

The lines are really looking good here.Just a few touch ups were needed with fairing compound.

Meanwhile, I was busy transforming Tent Model IX on the outside.

I need to widen the aft section so we can prime and paint the aft enclosure, put a “cap” on top so we can paint the helm station roof, and drop the sides to the ground all the way around to keep paint fumes under control.

Basically, I’m turning it into a big paint spray booth.

The tent transformation is nearly done on the starboard side.

1.5″ PVC hoops will go over the helm station roof from the long uprights aft to create a new tent roof frame 5′ higher than now. I’ll then cut the existing PVC film and raise the whole aft section over the top of the new hoops. Then, with lots of shrink wrap tape and the torch, I’ll weld new shrink wrap film to the old so it goes all the way to the ground and secure it along the sides of the tent structure all the way around.

I’ll be begging the goddess of the seas for dead calm on that day, let me tell you!

Next week, we’ll finish longboarding then put some nice fillets around the dash pod and at the cabin top to deck joint. Time permitting, we’ll also get the fairing work done on the fore and side decks. I’ll continue transforming the tent and hope to have that done by Sunday, when the forecast is for 5mph winds!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Fairing the Cabin Top (cont.)

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Salon Hatch Hole Problem Formulation

All of the big Chris Craft cruisers I’ve seen with the headline out had built-in hatch framing in the salon roof. Chris Craft built them into the boats to make repowering that much easier. Our Roamer was repowered with Super SeaMaster twin turbo engines back in 1973, so the hatch had already been cut out once. By the time we had acquired the boat in 2007 the hatch had begun to collapse, which allowed rain from the salon roof to fall inside the boat, eventually filling the engine room. After dejunking the boat, I removed the hatch so I could get the old engines and other big stuff out and put new stuff in.

While the original Chris Craft hatches are well conceived and executed, the reinstallation of the Roamer’s hatch in 1973 was not; hence the collapse.

This is the basic framework for Chris Craft salon hatches.

The mahogany salon roof frames are 1 3/8″ thick and of varying height. They follow the crown of the salon roof and support the 1/4 plywood that underlays the FRP and gelcoat salon top.

The hatch itself is a “box within a box” design, with 1/4 solid mahogany spacers between the two box sections and 3/8″ bronze bolts and washers spaced every 12″ to hold it all together. The open hatch hole on the 1969 Roamer 46 measures 5’x10′.

To remove the hatch, you simply remove the headliner and drill a small hole at each corner of the box. Then strike a line on the top side between the four holes and cut with a saw set to a shallow depth so as not to cut through the bolts. Then, support the hatch from below, unbolt it and out it comes!

Here’s what the frames look like installed in as-found condition

The outline of the hatch in 2007 was a tell-tale that the seam had broken

Upon closer inspection, I found that the seam was only covered with one layer of 3″ fiberglass tape, not much resin and the rest was fairing compound that had long since cracked apart.

All of that was topped with various forms of goo: both rubber and silicone, neither of which kept the rain out for long.

Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I can…take out a salon roof hatch all by myself!

The hatch came out in January 2008. Little did I know it would remain out until 2013.

By 2009 I determined that the hatch skin was shot. Water intrusion through the broken seam around the hatch had rotted out the 1/4″ plywood between the frames and the FRP skin.

This longitudinal outside hatch frame wasn’t horrible, but the plywood was rotten.

Port side aft, the plywood was the worst.

The rot caused the plywood to spread apart, pushing the fiberglass skin up and cracking it at the drilled out hole in the corner.

The plywood rot was really bad on the port side in the middle of the hatch.

The Cause of the hatch collapse: relief notches.

Nobody’s come up with a good explanation for why they cut notches out of the frames when the boat was repowered in 1973. This is definitely not something Chris Craft did originally. This longitudinal frame is actually the best of them all because it only has two small hairline cracks leading away from the tip of the notch.

Three of the four longitudinal hatch frames.

The fourth one was broken entirely at the notch that somebody cut out back in 1973. I’ve already recycled it into cleats (1″x1″ mahogany strips). The bottom one in this picture was almost (but not quite) completely cracked into two pieces.

So, what I started with was rotten plywood, broken frames and a cracked and deformed fiberglass cabin top skin. To fix the hatch and surrounding salon top structure would require stripping out all of the rotten old plywood and bonding in new. Then we’d have to cut new frames to replace the broken ones. Finally, we’d have to reassemble the whole structure that Chris Craft originally created upside-down in a mold from the gelcoat up, but I’d have to do it from the inside of the boat looking up and from the outside looking down!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Rebuilding the Salon Roof Hatch.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Tent Model IX

I’ve learned a lot about shrink wrap tentmaking since our Roamer 46 refit began in 2007, including what works well and what fails almost immediately. From my previous experiences with tents, I knew the features I wanted in Tent Model IX:

• Plenty of space to work on everything from the deck rub rail up.
• Plenty of head room, but not too much. We don’t want to make a sail.
• Stairs…because ladders truly suck.
• Storm resistance
• Lots of ventilation options but with the ability to hold in heat, too.
• The ability to bring big material, like 4×8 sheets of plywood, onboard.
• Finally, Tent Model IX needed to be built as a transformer…think Megatron, but in white.

The idea for the transforming tent came from earlier attempts to have a tent for all seasons: a tight work tent during nasty weather, but with the ability to roll up the sides when it’s hot outside. Tent Model IX’s transformation will be from a storm resistant work tent from autumn 2012 through winter 2013 to a paint shed in the spring of 2013, when we’ll paint the Roamer from the boot top to the helm station roof.

This is Tent Model V from 2009 (AKA The Beast)

We saved the frame uprights and bow pieces and reused them on Model IX in September 2012. When we transform Model IX from a work tent to a paint tent, we’ll install the scaffolding from Model V, too.

Introducing…Tent Model IX!

* Heavy duty 1.5″ PVC pipe frames
* Frame uprights hold the shrink wrap away from the deck rub rail
* To make it more practical to heat, the shrink wrap tucks in tight to the hull below all of the port hole and engine ventilation openings.
* And, it’s transformable. All I have to do is loosen the hose clamps holding the PVC pipe to the 2×4 uprights, and I can adjust the height as needed.

I know, I know…the nose is baggy.

I tucked that in and shrunk it later, but the wrap really doesn’t want to be in this shape. Shrinking it, especially on the underside, would always have unintended consequences somewhere else. Eventually, it got to the point of “good enough.”

The tent tucks in tight to the deck at mid-ships.

There was very little deck work to be done from the helm station aft, so it didn’t need to be as wide there. All of the aft enclosure work is scheduled to be done during the paint phase in spring~early summer 2013.

Making the vestibule/storage area/stairs.

The deck surface back here is just the right height for the painter to reach the entire transom when we paint Awlgrip later this year.

The vestibule/storage area/stairs enclosed.

It’s also closed off with plastic from under the boat, too, so no critters or water will be able to easily find its way in.

Inside, we have the stairs going up.

They’re extremely sturdy.

The dust relocator…er..collector is in the vestibule.

The piping for it runs up to the deck level and down the length of the boat to the bow.

Note the corrugated drain pipe “dust collector ducting,” a cheap solution since flexible 4″ duct hose runs $40 for 10 feet. While it’s not the smoothest flowing duct, it’s fine for our purposes and has been working flawlessly.

The view from the aft deck showing the dust collector duct running down the length of the cabin.

There’s one outlet for the aft deck/table saw area, another at mid-ships and one more at the bow. Each outlet has a blast door, so you can select which one gets the suction.

There’s plenty of width and headroom over the cabin top.

The bow deck is where I was cutting 3/4″ douglas fir marine ply for floorboards. Once cut, we would load them inside the boat through the salon hatch hole that was still open from the 2008 repower to Ford Lehman 120s.

Cutting and painting aft stateroom and V-berth floorboards on the bow.

Tent Model IX has plenty of working room. It’s by far the best tent yet, and the dust collector hose on the right is very good at controlling dust in the working space.

Removable storm supports go from the aluminum side decks to the 1.5″ PVC pipe frames.

We haven’t needed them in 2013 (yet!), but after Tent Model XIII collapsed under a snow load from Snowmageddon it seemed wise to be prepared.

While we didn’t get hit by Son of Snowmageddon this year,  Late October 2012 was when Superstorm Sandy came to town. One thing I’d noticed about large shrink wrap tents over the years was that strong winter winds try very hard to turn them into kites. Any time the wind hit 30kts it grabbed that big lifting surface on the under side of Tent Model IX around the forward part of the hull and tried to make it fly!

So, in preparation for Sandy, I tied a stone onto the end of three long lengths of shrink wrap line (the stuff that normally holds the shrink wrap to the hull) and launched them over the top of the tent. The lines crossed near the top, along the 2×4 backbone of the tent, and I fastened them tightly to the boatstands on either side so they put the whole structure under tension.

Tent Model IX survived Sandy’s sustained 45mph winds and 75mph gusts, with one local sailor noting an 85mph blast during the peak of the storm in Deale. When I arrived to survey the damage the day after the storm, I was surprised to see…no damage at all. For surviving Sandy unscathed and being outstanding in all other ways (except for the baggy nose 😉 ), Tent Model IX rates 5/5 stars.

With a stable tent that doesn’t require hours and hours to fix every week, as in previous models, by October 2012 we were going all-out gangbusters.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer Refit: The Bow Seat.