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Teak Deck Installation Part II
Due to my day to day work, need the money to finish the
boat, I have not been able to spent too much time the last 12 months on
continuing with the repairs, the same is expected for the next year. I have
been working on the boat but most of the repairs were repeat repairs of earlier
described work onto the boat.
Although it looks like a long time that I took to have the
caulking cure of the teak deck this was intentional. Idea was to finish the outside roof of the
main cabin first before continuing with the deck. Will describe the roof of the main cabin painting in another blog.
We continued where we left the teak deck after calking between
the planks.
The first thing to do was to course sand the teak deck, grade
40, to get all the excess of caulking of the deck, when this was done the deck
looked great, from a distance.
A closer look showed that there were area’s in the calking
which showed smaller and some larger holes. One can leave these smaller holes in
place but as I have seen, even under a tiny hole in the caulking a large hole
can be present. Reason for these holes can be to quickly filling the groove
between the planks with caulking, not taking enough time to fill the groove completely, working slowly and diligent. Or
when one starts with a new tube of caulking and forgets to let the air out.
How to solve the issue of the holes, one need good tools: sharp knife and I used a chisel slightly smaller than the groove. One then
carefully cuts the caulking out of the groove where the holes are. I cut all
the caulking out till I reached the wood to make sure that no holes in the
caulking would be present. Also cleaned the sides from caulking.
Next step is to place masking tape on the sides of the groove we do
not want to get to much caulking onto the sanded teak deck again.
Clean the groove make sure all the dirt and loose rubber and
wood are vacuumed out completely, prepare the groove with Sikaflex primer,
Sikaflex is the system I used but as mentioned in my earlier blog there are
other suitable caulking’s for teak decks. Most important is to follow the manufacturers instructions and do not make short cuts.
The following step is to fill the groove with caulking and use a putty knife to make
sure that the groove is full and that the caulking is not sticking to high
above the deck.
Reason for not having too much caulking sticking out above the deck is
that sanding will be more difficult as well as that when there is too much caulking
onto the tape that the tape cannot be removed before the sanding is started.
With a little thin layer of caulking onto the tape, the tape
can be removed after the caulking has dried. If the tape cannot be removed one
needs to sand it off, which will make the teak deck dirty with glue from the tape
What is left then is sanding of the area’s where new caulking
has been filled into the groves between the planks. As can be seen from below picture there is no difference between older caulking and new caulking .
