Welcome to my restoration journey. In June of 2019, I purchased a 19 foot 1961 Chris-Craft Continental. It needed a lot of work but after going to boat building school in Maine and discovering a local chapter of the ACBS (acbs.org) with tons of resources, I got excited about bringing this classic back to life.
So I found this wood boat on a national Antique Boat website and discovered the boat was right here in Atlanta. In fact, it was less than a mile from where I had owned a house in Smyrna, a suburb of Atlanta.
The owner was only the second owner of the boat. He had collected a fair amount of information on the boat from the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, Virginia. Items included an owners manual for the boat and the engine, equipment record from Chris-Craft and original ads with pictures.
The boat was delivered to Jackson Georgia on October 13, 1960 and purchased by a gentlemen in Jackson, GA. The first owner used the boat up until he sold it on May 30, 1996 to the person I bought it from. At that time the boat was in fairly good shape and to the second owners credit, the bright work was redone in 1998. However, after about 10 years the second owner let the boat sit behind his house unused. So the boat had been sitting for just over 10 years before I came to own it. Fortunately, the second owner did mist the engine with oil before letting it set. The engine turns freely and I'm hopeful that it won't take much to get it running again.
This was the photo he took when he advertised the boat for sale.
Over the last several weeks I have continued to work on attaching the plywood bottom and the intermediate frames. In order to do it by myself I've had to get creative. But as of today, I have just 9 intermediate frames to go and one last piece of the plywood bottom. Here is a frame where I drew a line to line up through the hole that's drilled in the correct position. Once I prepare the frame, I line it up through the holes. However the one near the keel is to far away to move the frame and see in the hole. So I attached the frame near the chine and then used a mirror to see it near the keel. For the starboard bow plywood piece, I attached the intermediate frames before I attached the plywood to the boat. However, this made it more challenging to be sure the plywood was in contact with the keel near the frame farthest from the bow. So I clamped it and them piled a couple of cinder blocks to insure contact. After this I w...
Now that the planks are bent, I've moved on to the plywood bottom. The original had 3 pieces and now I realize why some frames were built the way they were. The first two from the transom to amidships were fairly easy. I left an over hang which I'll make flush later. Here are the first two after cutting and fitting. I attached these but before moving on, I had to address a frame that was very low. When we bent the bow planks, we noticed a dip in the board we bent. So, I had to attach a filler to bring it up to level. When I was doing this, I remembered that I had a low frame and put off addressing it. Well . . . the time had come. Once this was completed, I moved on to the other four pieces of plywood. All my friends had been telling me that the plywood would not bend in two directions near the bow so I should cut foot wide strips to install at an angle, so the plywood was only bending in one direction. However, I had ple...
Bending the bottom planks had some challenges. My friend Al came over to help. At first, I started with one at a time. This if the first 2 garboard planks steamed and bent into place. To cut out some of these bow planks I had to clamp them down to trace their shape. I also had to create an improvised soaking tub. The last one I made was designed for the transom piece I had to bend which was much shorter. This is what I came up with in my trailer. Worked well because to empty it I just let the plastic down in the back and moved the trailer tongue up the hill a little. So after the first two, Al came over to help and we did the final 6 in a couple of hours. On the starboard side I had one board that cracked a little. I repaired it with epoxy since it will not be seen once it's on the boat. It will be painted where the crack happened. After I removed them to do the plywood, I noticed another which I fixed also.
