Teak Deck Installation Part II

                                                      
                                                      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 .