Fabricating the forward fender/dock line locker

Perhaps one of the most controversial additions we made to the visible exterior lines of Third Wave was the forward rope/fender locker.  Die hard Chris Craft Commander purists will barf all over it and might even send death threats once they see it.  But Mary Mar had very little in the way of storage and we did not want to have to walk fenders and lines fore and aft.  With the understanding that some people love them, I will say that I am not a fan of crud that is tied to the bow rail (like fender baskets).  In my experience they are always falling apart, leaving your fenders to bake in the sun and loosening up on the rail any chance they get.  I also just don’t like the way they look even when new and I really don’t like them when they are a bit rusty and carrying sun damaged fenders around.  Pretty much nothing short of stainless steel handles the sun like gel coat.  So we decided to install a large forward dock line/fender locker.

We started this project by buying a pre-made hatch from Ebay.  For this project we wanted a more professional water channel than the square one that we implemented for the back deck hatch.  In order to do this, we used the hatch to create a router template in a sheet of ¼” flat birch plywood.

The wooden router template is shown below.

The router template was then used with a half round bit to cut the initial channel in the coosa top piece of the locker.

The channel was cut such that the edge of the hatch would fit down into the depression we created.  We then built up the height of the channel by adding material on both sides of it combined with hours of hand sanding, fitting and shaping.

Then we added the initial sides and then just kept slowly adding layers of glass to the sides of the channel in order to reduce the gap between the hatch and the top to well under 1/4”.  

We then took the unit to the boat to try to figure out the exact end height that we would go with.  For various reasons it was decided to make the unit taller by adding a base to what had been fabricated at home.

The base (and the whole unit except the hatch cover) was fabricated from Coosa.

 

It was cold in Virginia at the time so we created a small curing tent fed by a propane heater.  We put our parts in here each time we needed something like glass or gel coat to cure quickly (or at all…).

The resulting box was glassed to the foredeck both on the inside and on the outside and then everything was faired in.  It’s still waiting to be sprayed with gel coat.

It’s not fancy but it will hold a lot of stuff and that’s what we needed to get done.

Next up: Updating the ground tackle/bow pulpit