simulated glovebox
Not long ago a fellow member of the Yahoo.com San Juan 24 forum observed that I seem to be preoccupied with the creature comforts aboard my boat. I don't see any shame in that: Unlike most of the SJ-24 owners I've met, I'm more interested in daysailing and cruising Brushfire than in racing her. Therefore I'm not too concerned with trimming every last ounce of weight or skating the edge of the NACA regulations at any opportunity.
Many times the rushing of the water past the hull and the singing of the wind in the rigging is music enough. Other times the wind dies, or you're tied up in the marina oiling the brightwork. I had a "boombox" aboard Brushfire that only worked while connected to shore power and which couldn't pick up my favorite radio station even when it was operable. Luckily, our friends at West Marine had an AM/FM CD player with speakers on sale in May. Perfect! But... where to install it?
The hull liner on an SJ-24 incorporates a series of gloveboxes on the port side, and the one just forward of the electrical panel seemed like a perfect place to stash a stereo. I've seen car stereos just wired into the 12v system and dropped bare into the bottom of glovebox cubbyhole, but that seemed a bit crude. Here's a design that should be adaptable to any boat with a similar configuration.
First I measured the dimensions of the target location, including the depth between the face of the liner and the hull at top and bottom of the glovebox opening, its width, and the angle the glovebox panel makes with vertical. At home, I mocked up the target configuration in cardboard.
This gave me a pattern to work from in designing the faceplate for the stereo rack, as well as a way to test-fit things without making the 20-minute drive to the marina. I settled on making the faceplate plate 1/2-inch wider all around than the opening in the hull liner. The stereo package I purchased included a pair of 6-inch diameter flush-mount speakers, and initially I had considered installing one of them in the faceplate. It looked like too tight a fit though, and I couldn't figure out an acceptable way to mount the other speaker on the starboard side so I opted to center the stereo and include a storage pocket to hold a few CDs.
Properly the material for this project should've been teak to match the rest of Brushfire's interior woodwork, but 1/4-inch oak veneer plywood was much more reasonably priced, mistakes would be correspondingly cheaper, and it could be stained to resemble the teak.
The design itself is fairly simple and was easily shaped with a tablesaw, scrollsaw, and a belt/disk sander. (In fact, it could be done with a nothing more than a Skilsaw, a coping saw, sandpaper, and elbow grease.)
One important point to keep in mind is that the vertical space available may be substantially different than the simple height of the glovebox opening due to the angle of the surface. (On a '75 SJ-24 the angle of the hull liner that forms the face of the gloveboxes is about 45° from vertical.)
The major assemblies are simply the faceplate and a shelf structure. The shelf parts fit together with crude dado joints made with two adjacent passes on the table saw. After staining the surfaces that would be visible after the rack was installed, I glued the shelf assembly together with ordinary wood glue.
Once the shelf assembly had dried, I glued it to the back of the faceplate plate and tacked it in place with cyanoacrylate "super glue" using small wood scraps as chocks to ensure that everything would stay where I wanted it while the wood glue set up.
After everything had dried overnight, I coated the unstained surfaces with West System 105 epoxy for waterproofing and for added strength.
Once the epoxy had cured I installed the metal DIN mounting bracket that came with the stereo. I waited to drill mounting holes in the faceplate until I could check the exact fit aboard the boat.
From a local car-stereo shop I purchased a quantity of the U-shaped nut clips used to mount speakers in door panels, intending to use these for mounting the faceplate to the hull liner. Unfortunately, these clips are about 3/4-inch long, and I hadn't included enough overlap in the faceplate plate around the edge of the liner opening to use them. Instead I ended up threading brass wood screws directly into the fiberglass of the liner. I don't like this solution much, and at the least I'll probably epoxy wood scraps to the inside of the liner for additional support.
I purchased West Marine box speakers for inside the cabin. Eventually I'll use the flush-mount speakers from the stereo kit in the cockpit, after I study the mounting technique a friend came up with for his Catalina 30: Modifying screw-on deck plates to protect the speakers when they're not in use.
I also adapted the fiddle rope idea presented by Alan Lucas in the May/June 2001 issue of Good Old Boat to keep the CDs safely in their storage slot when things get interesting underway.
Overall I'm happy with the way this project turned out. Wouldn't you know it though, I still can't get a decent signal from my favorite radio station. But hey, if Guglielmo Marconi had owned a CD player we would probably be calling that tall stick with all the wires a "Bermuda rig" or something!