1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Aft Stateroom Doors

This article covers the aft stateroom doors I made using lightweight Tricel honeycomb panels and 1/8″ mahogany veneer plywood.

I’m using 3/4″ Tricel panels for the interior doors

As with the aft deck helm sliding doors, I’m using Tricel panels for the interior doors because they’re lightweight and much better suited to the marine environment than standard hollow-core doors.

All these Tricel panels are rough-cut for specific door openings

This one’s for the aft head

Mark off the panels in preparation for final test fit

Take off a bit here and a bit there…it’s ready to test fit

It’s square to the wall panels, but too tall and too wide

Lengthwise cut and…

Height cut…this door panel is ready for the edge treatment

Next, I test fitted and marked the aft stateroom entryway door for the final cuts

After cutting the panel to fit, I used my Harbor Freight universal tool to trim away 1″ of the Tricel honeycomb all around the perimeter of the panel.

Solid mahogany filler pieces are ready to be epoxied into the panel edge

I use wood flour-thickened epoxy as the glue to bond the mahogany solid stock to the Tricel panel edge

After putting thickened epoxy inside the panel, I wet out the solid stock with straight epoxy, then shove the solid stock inside the panel edge.

Once the epoxy cures, I cut out the solid edge to accommodate the door latch hardware

I had all of the original Chris Craft door hardware rechromed

They’re really beautiful, very well made, and period-correct.

Next, I mixed up a bunch of epoxy for the mahogany door veneer

I’m using the door clamping boxes I made in 2020 to assemble the door panels. The boxes are dead flat, heavy, and covered with shrink wrap film so any epoxy that squeezes out won’t stick.

After wetting out the least-pretty side of the 1/8″ ribbon stripe mahogany veneer panel, I applied wood flour-thickened epoxy. Then I spread it out evenly with a notched trowel. This is the same approach you’d use with floor tiles held down with adhesive. But since this is epoxy, I also wetted out the Tricel panel face to ensure a permanent bond.

Next, I pressed the wetted out side of the Tricel panel onto the veneer

Then I repeated the process on the other side, but with the thickened epoxy applied to the Tricel panel

Nice!

Epoxy squeeze-out looks good

Door clamping box #2 goes on top of the glued up panel

I use lots of Harbor Freight clamps to apply just enough even pressure to ensure uniform epoxy squeeze out

I’m going to wrap up this post here. I can’t make any promises when I’ll post next, but I’ll try to get back on a more regular schedule. Stay tuned!

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Wrapping Up the Aft Stateroom Doors

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Helm Station Mahogany IV

You know how it goes with projects: the prep takes 90% of the total time and it’s kind of ugly along the way, then in a blink it’s done and everything’s pretty? The aft deck solid mahogany went kinda like that.

First, I sanded all of the mahogany pieces with Mirka Abranet 240

I hit all of the flat surfaces first with just the stock sanding pad. With Abranet, the vacuum pulls almost all of the dust through. It’s a lot better than any paper-backed sandpaper I’ve ever used.

Once the flat areas are done, I put a foam spacer pad on and hit the radiused edges. Then move on to the next piece and repeat.

Ready for Spar varnish

First coat seals the wood

Second coat

3rd coat and done

Ready to install.

First, saturate the back-sides of each panel with US Composites epoxy

At the same time, we wetted out the hardtop structural wood that these pieces will attach to.

Next, trowel on some wood flour and cabosil-thicken epoxy

Glued & screwed in place

Repeat the process for the center and starboard panels

Next up come the long side panels

Gotta keep the epoxy off of the Awlgrip paint!

Saturate the wooden attachment points

That 50-year old plywood I reused here sure soaks up the epoxy.

More wood flour and cabosil-thickened epoxy

Trowel on the glue and get ready to screw

Ready to install the panel

That’s quite nice

Port side got installed next

Next, we installed bungs in the screw holes

The bungs will get sanded later and get a few spot coats of varnish. Then I’ll sand all of the wood back here and apply the final coat. But that’ll happen after the boat’s splashed.

Last step: install the window finish pieces

It would have looked cleaner to just make these side pieces out of a single mahogany stick. But the little finish pieces can be removed without destroying anything, and that will allow me to take out the windows if I have to. I find that the window tracks I’m using get packed with dirt, and that makes the windows slide less smoothly. Being able to remove the glass and give the tracks a thorough cleaning is a periodical maintenance item. So it’s worth having the little finish/fascia panels removable.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Helm Station Radio Box II

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Helm Station Mahogany III

With the helm bulkhead refreshed with a new sheet of mahogany, I got busy on the cabinet on the starboard side of the helm.

1/2″ ribbon-stripe mahogany ply is rough cut for the helm side cabinet faces

Gotta tighten up that gap at the top of the port-side helm cabinet panel a bit

I broke the panels down with 90° cuts a month or so ago when I was racing against rain from a hurricane to get the plywood inside the tent. But the decks aren’t 90° to the bulkhead. They’re angled, so any water that comes in will flow aft and off the boat.

Gotta love the EurekaZone track saw for making angled plywood cuts

That’s better

Before I glued the veneer panel on the helm bulkhead, I was fitting the side cabinet panels

That’s better

That’s better…time for varnish

Second coat

That one-part urethane Spar Varnish is driving me nuts. It gums up the Mirka Abranet 240 grit almost immediately.

MasterMind plunge saw is a great tool for cutting cabinet door openings

Finish the corner cuts with the Makita jigsaw

The jigsaw blades have a bigger kerf than the little plunge saw.

That’s looking pretty good

Time to make a cabinet box frame

That nasty looking piece of cracked, half-painted 1″ thick mahogany must have come from the OEM forward head enclosure. I saved it because I knew it’d come in handy one day.

Today’s that day.

Chopping up 1/4″ ribbon-stripe mahogany plywood into cabinet box parts

No screws this time

I’m framing out the cabinet box with mahogany solid stock wetted out with US Composites epoxy followed by epoxy thickened with wood flour and cabosil

Next day, it’s all coming together

Next, I’ll varnish the cabinet box panel faces, epoxy the backing cleats to each panel, fit and finish the back panels, then this cabinet’s ready to install.

“Progress”

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Helm Station Mahogany IV

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 Headliner Prep

The aft stateroom headliner prep is coming along nicely. I decided to jump into the salon for a change of pace and get it ready for headliner, too.

Also, I wanted to express great gratitude to those of you who hit the tip jar. I’ve been documenting this refit as a labor of love, but it feels really great to know people put tangible value on my effort. Plus, since I went from the free WordPress site that had all those irritating ads to my own ad-free domain, every donation helps cover the cost of hosting. Thanks a lot!

Whisper Wall perimeter track will work great here at the salon aft bulkhead

The trouble starts here, at the helm station chase

There’s got to be a continuous surface for the headliner track to attach to. I’ve discussed the problems I’ve discovered on the port side–the broken salon fiberglass under the helm window, the mahogany safety rail in that area that was clearly not original, the stainless stanchion pipes that had obviously been replaced. My theory is that when they were doing the repower to the twin turbo SuperSeamasters, they dropped one of the engines on the port side helm windshield, which broke the salon roof and the mahogany safety rail, and bent some of the stainless stanchions. It also caused some of the salon ceiling frames to get way out of alignment. In the picture above, you can see how the horizontal frame doesn’t meet its counterpart in the corner…it’s higher. And like a teeter-totter, if it’s high on one end, it’s going to be low on the other.

All of the framing in this area has been pushed down

The horizontal cleat didn’t move

But the ceiling framing is 1/2″ low!

There’s no way the Whisper Wall track will work with this

I want to have a separate little hatch panel here, so I can access the wiring and cables under the helm station. But with the frames 1/2″ out of alignment with the perimeter cleat, that’s just not going to work. Plus, the frames are far enough out of alignment that they’ll ‘print through’ onto the headliner…can’t have that.

Something really heavy must have landed on this area to cause this problem

I’m not going to tear off the cabintop and start over, and the fact of the matter is that the ceiling is stable in its current orientation. So what I need to do is add material to bring the perimeter cleats to the same height as the rest of the ceiling framing.

First, I need a long, tapered cleat

This EurekaZone track saw workstation is great for making angled cuts quickly

That’s a nice fit

Nice transition between the cleat and frame

The taper will smoothly bring the track down to the original perimeter cleat

Looks pretty good

Cut a short tapered piece of mahogany for the side of the helm chase

The cleat is a bit too narrow

3/4″ okume plywood scrap will make a good filler piece

The filler piece will go here

Next, I drilled pocket screw holes with my Kreg jig

Last step: glue and screw everything in place

That’s a nice transition for the headliner track to attach to

Looks good on the other side

Wood flour-thickened epoxy is the glue

The 3/4″ plywood filler piece is glued, screwed, and clamped in place

Well, that’s one problem solved. I wish I knew for sure how this damage happened, but I’m sticking with my theory until something proves me wrong. If I’m right, can you imagine the horror on the mechanics’ faces as the engine and gear tumbled to the ground, wreaking havoc all the way down?

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Salon Entryway Panel

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing Aft Stateroom Walls II

Back in late January 2015, I thought we were going to get away with a very pleasant winter. I was wrong.

We have been hammered by temps down to zero Fahrenheit with wind chill piling on top of that. There have been a half dozen or so snow, sleet, and/or ice dumps. Through it all, though, Tent Model X has held up well (far better than some of my earlier tent attempts). I only intended for this tent to get me through to autumn 2014, when I planned to splash the boat. But when the tent was burglarized in May 2014, it knocked me completely off schedule. So Tent Model X has had to go through more than I anticipated, but it’s taken the abuse and held up well. Even when it’s way below freezing outside, the 70,000BTU kerosene-powered bazooka heater brings the interior of the boat up to a comfortable working temperature so epoxy will kick within 45 minutes or so. In spite of the nasty winter, our Roamer refit keeps moving in the right direction.

Snowstorm No. 4…or was it 5?

Snow storm No. 5…or was it 6?

Who really cares at this point…

The important thing is, things are moving along on the inside. With the main aft stateroom wall panels fitted and one installed, the second one was a breeze.

The closest panel lands in the middle of the porthole

Fortunately, the second panel attaches directly to an overhead frame.

Pocket screw holes done in 2 minutes…getting faster at this

Good, tight fit…ready for through bolting and pocket screwing the base

Time to get the corner piece ready to glue and screw in.

First, clean up the inside corner so the panel fully seats

There was some mahogany remaining in the inside corner from the saw blade not quite being set high enough. It was right at the corner and was making it impossible to fully seat the panel, so I ran a die grinder disk from end to end and plowed a bit of a furrow.

Next, drill 1/8″ pilot holes from the one side, spaced 6″ apart

It’s a lot easier to drill holes perpendicular to where the panel will be with the inside corner as a reference than to drill it from the back-side at an angle.

Flip the corner piece, and countersink the pilot hole

One line of countersinks done

Wet out the inside corner with straight epoxy

Getting the glue joint ready

After wetting out the cut edge of the wall panel 2~3 times with epoxy, I mixed up another batch with wood flour to a peanut butter consistency and applied it over the wetted out edge.

Wetted out the floor ply where the corner piece will land, then applied thickened epoxy

Wood flour-thickened epoxy applied to the inside corner

Next, clamp the corner piece to the panel

The orange rubber glove protects the wood, but I needed to get creative with clamps to pull it all together.

A clamp on the hull stringer, with another clamp attached to it…

There’s probably a better way, but I worked with what I had.

Glued and screwed with the clamps removed

Second wall panel installed

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Installing Aft Stateroom Walls III