1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 refit

[jim rosenthal]

Q, if you need, I can drive down there with my pickup and move the welder for you. It would have to be Wednesday, the only day I don't work this week.

[q240z]

Thanks Jim! But I plan to just work through this one. My splash date is obviously a flexible one, and it's not like anybody's gonna die if I don't get the standpipes welded in soon. The truck comes back tomorrow. Hopefully, that's the last of that particular variety of misery.
Cheers,
Q

[q240z]

But wait!! There's more!!

$3,500 later, my truck transmission is fixed, but now it's running rough and tripping catalytic converter codes! Dang it!

But on the boat refit, I decided to use a combination of ceramic fiber blanket insulation and Inferno Wrap to insulate the dry sections of my exhaust risers, which I'll top with a layer of fiberglass and high temp epoxy to make the hard shell. The ceramic fiber blanket worked out real well. If I had to do over again, I'd skip the Inferno Wrap entirely. Aw well...lesson learned.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Insulating the Starboard Exhaust Riser

Cheers,
Q

[q240z]

I decided to make new safety rail stanchions to replace the four made from tubing that had been replaced at some point in the boat's life. The tubing stanchions are shiny, but you can't make proper NPT threads on tubing. The stanchion bases mount to the mahogany toe rail, and even though I sealed up all of the wood with epoxy I don't want water leaking past the threads. All it would take is a pinhole...

So, on the recommendation of some fabricator buddies, I first tried to have the new pipes threaded on a professional-grade machine. That didn't work out so well. The nice fellow at Home Depot cut the threads, but when I picked up the pipes he said something about the stainless being particularly hard and the threader die not being as sharp as it could be. Turns out he made the threaded area deform into a triangular shape. So, on the advice of other fabricator buddies, I bought some stainless nipples and welded them to the pipes. That approach turned out pretty good. I have to admit that having the tungsten sticking out 1" to tack the pipe to the nipple was unnerving at first, but it worked out really well.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: The Safety Rail Stanchions (again)

Cheers,
Q

[q240z]

Earlier this year, I got all of the remaining tinted glass I need but then discovered that some panes didn't fit. Some of them were my fault and others were the glass factory's fault. Either way, we finally got the issues resolved satisfactorily and the new glass arrived on the day after Christmas. The boat looks better with each piece that get installed. Let's hope I can pick up the pace and get this thing splashed before the end of the season in 2017.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Last of the New Tinted Glass Has Arrived!

Cheers,
Q

[krush]

Earlier this year, I got all of the remaining tinted glass I need but then discovered that some panes didn't fit. Some of them were my fault and others were the glass factory's fault. Either way, we finally got the issues resolved satisfactorily and the new glass arrived on the day after Christmas.

What type of glass did you use? Is it laminated with tint in between? I need to replace some piece that are cracked in my boat....I figured the best way is to try to keep them in one piece and take to a glass shop. I'd like to put a slight tint on the side sliding salon windows, but no tint on the windshield because of lower station and potential night driving.

[q240z]

I went with 1/4" tempered & tinted. Every boat I've had that's used safety glass, it ends up delaminating. Or you end up a crack in an inner or outer pane from a light tap. Tempered is a lot stronger, and for sliders the pencil polish that Consolidated put on them is much smoother than what Chris Craft used or even what Baltimore Glass did in the first batch...which was just a bevel, more or less.

For a retail glass shop, just bringing in the glass is the way to go. I had to have enough panes made that it made sense to get set up with a wholesale account. The price break was significant...like 2/3 savings. But that also meant I had to provide them with CAD files, which had a bit of a learning curve. A slick way to do it if you've got panes that are exactly the size you need is to snap pictures of them, then import the jpgs into a CAD program, like LibreCAD, trace the outline and then scale as necessary. Then select and discard the jpg and BOOM...2D dxf file ready for the glass shop.

It sounds so easy now, but I spent the better part of 3 months worth of my "spare time" trying to figure out how to do it.

[q240z]

Over the New Year weekend, I dug back into my exhaust risers. I was hoping to get them both insulated and covered with a hard shell fiberglass layer, but the only good that came out of two days' work was that I added another 1" layer of that ceramic fabric blanket I'm using. The mandrel bends are so tight that I'm not able to get the fiberglass layers to lay down tight to the substrate and smooth. There's also a question of how to stop gravity from making the resin run to the bottom of the risers and drip off if I wet the fiberglass out enough to give a nice, shiny top coat appearance. Much as I hate to admit defeat, this one's got me stumped. I'm leaning toward just wrapping the ceramic blankets with Inferno Wrap and calling it done. If anybody has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: More Exhaust Riser Insulation

Cheers,
Q

[krush]

I went with 1/4" tempered & tinted.

Why tempered instead of laminated safety? Just curious. I'm going with laminated....it may crack, but at least I'll still have a window in place to keep water out.

[q240z]

Because tempered takes a lot harder hit than laminated before it might break. For sliders, I can't imagine why anyone would use laminated. The only window failures I've had on boats have been laminated that's separated or cracked a single pane. If I was in the habit of throwing wrenches, the ability of laminated to fill the hole even when broken (but put nasty shards all over the place) might be desirable.