“1942 Chris-Craft 17′ Special Runabout”
Bruce Kester
October 2, 2018
Owners Story
This week we will take a little trip down the street to our Sunnyland Presidents home and catch up on a beautiful 1942 17′ Chris-Craft Special Runabout project he is working on. Now in our owners words…
This is a boat that I am working on at my home shop in Tavares, Florida. It’s a pre-war double cockpit forward model that was offered for only one model year in 1942. There were a total of 241 hulls built. The interesting thing about this particular boat is the completion date on the hull card which reads 12/8/41, the day after the December 7 Sunday morning attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The photos are just a few recent shots of the project and the deck is now in the process of being replaced. The rest of the hull has been completed which included new keel, chines, lower stem, lower transom framing and all but one of the bottom frames which were either cracked or oil soaked in the area beneath the engine. The bottom is laminated and the hull sides utilized most of the original planks which were run through a planer and glued on to plywood. The original book matching of the planks in clearly evident and I wanted to retain that look.
