chal
Member
I was going to add this to the "Teak Decks!" thread but any classics forum needs a more general Deck Leaks thread anyway (perhaps the software powering classics forums should have built-in threads to save us the trouble of starting threads for varnish, stockholm tar, leaks, etc etc). And, my deck isn't teak ;(
My deck is now 75 years old and is pine planks, 1 inch thick. When I bought the boat, the wood itself was in quite good condition but the screws were not, and the sikaflex no longer adhered to the planks in a number of places. The surface was just bare wood. Overall, it looked ok: I think the comment about teak decks looking fine scruffy and suitable for royalty when clean probably applies to any natural wood. However, when it rained, it rained almost as much below the deck as above, and something absolutely had to be done about it.
I am restoring the boat on a strict budget (it actually costs me a lot more than I first intended, even trying to be strict) and I also have limited time. I was very lucky because where I was doing the work, someone was building a boat from scratch (the big lugger I put a link to in the "Designing and building a modern wooden classic" thread); he was just the nicest and most helpful person you could ever hope to meet and gave me a lot of advice, lent me some tools, etc, and under his guidance I did the following.
First, I screwed the deck down. I understand Tillergirl's point about this taking 10 years to replace the screws and I did not do that. The original screws were put into the beams in a "top left, bottom right" pattern, so I put new screws in bottom left and top right. Where the old screws were exposed and the wood had gone soft I scraped it out, then filled all the exposed screw recesses with cheap Trago Mills sikaflex substitute. It took over a thousand screws and I did not have time to put little wooden plugs in every new hole plus most of the old holes. I reckon about 90-odd percent of my screws went into sound timber so I'm taking the beams on trust. I then repaired the sikaflex: I didn't remove it all but cut out areas where it was no longer adhering to the deck, and filled the holes with more of the Trago gunk (£3 a tube, and I used a lot of tubes).
My plan at that stage was to sand the whole lot down and apply Coelans (once again, a cheaper brand) as that would tend to run into any cracks and both seal any remaining small leaks and add UV protection to the cheap-o-flex. It looked pretty good, but I hadn't realised that that sort of finish goes cloudy when wet, so overall it mostly looked a bit peculiar. In the end, I decided to go for a solid colour, and the decks are now green, and swmbo and I think they look pretty good.
The final result is that they do keep most of the water out: we get the odd drip although that's mostly condensation from the portholes. Last summer of course when everything went a bit mad and there was a strange big hot yellow thing in the sky for a change, the planking shrank a bit and the leaks started again, albeit on a much smaller scale than before. Captain Tolley thankfully sorted them out. We repaint the deck annually and it does pretty much do the trick (the paint is expensive though).
Apart from sharing experiences and getting a bit of early morning typing practice, a point of this thread is to pose a question too, and that is the old chestnut of: is it really possible to stop wooden decks leaking???
Where swmbo and I differ about the deck is that I think that if I ever had some spare money - however unlikely that might be - I'd like to replace the deck and would probably go for plywood with a glass mat covering, using the woven glass that hopefully would end up looking like canvas when painted. Chal is what might be called a "smack yacht" and canvas deck covers would have been pretty common on such boats. I would hope this would finally stop all the leaks and reduce maintenance to a lick of normal deck paint when it looked worn. Swmbo on the other hand thinks this would be sacrilege: we would loose the pattern of the planks which is still clearly visible, and old wooden boats are supposed to have the odd leak.
What does the panel think?
This is what the deck looks like now (actually at its worst after last summer's heatwave, so you can see some caulking mess around a few of the seams):
and this is what is underneath (at the end of the repair process):
My deck is now 75 years old and is pine planks, 1 inch thick. When I bought the boat, the wood itself was in quite good condition but the screws were not, and the sikaflex no longer adhered to the planks in a number of places. The surface was just bare wood. Overall, it looked ok: I think the comment about teak decks looking fine scruffy and suitable for royalty when clean probably applies to any natural wood. However, when it rained, it rained almost as much below the deck as above, and something absolutely had to be done about it.
I am restoring the boat on a strict budget (it actually costs me a lot more than I first intended, even trying to be strict) and I also have limited time. I was very lucky because where I was doing the work, someone was building a boat from scratch (the big lugger I put a link to in the "Designing and building a modern wooden classic" thread); he was just the nicest and most helpful person you could ever hope to meet and gave me a lot of advice, lent me some tools, etc, and under his guidance I did the following.
First, I screwed the deck down. I understand Tillergirl's point about this taking 10 years to replace the screws and I did not do that. The original screws were put into the beams in a "top left, bottom right" pattern, so I put new screws in bottom left and top right. Where the old screws were exposed and the wood had gone soft I scraped it out, then filled all the exposed screw recesses with cheap Trago Mills sikaflex substitute. It took over a thousand screws and I did not have time to put little wooden plugs in every new hole plus most of the old holes. I reckon about 90-odd percent of my screws went into sound timber so I'm taking the beams on trust. I then repaired the sikaflex: I didn't remove it all but cut out areas where it was no longer adhering to the deck, and filled the holes with more of the Trago gunk (£3 a tube, and I used a lot of tubes).
My plan at that stage was to sand the whole lot down and apply Coelans (once again, a cheaper brand) as that would tend to run into any cracks and both seal any remaining small leaks and add UV protection to the cheap-o-flex. It looked pretty good, but I hadn't realised that that sort of finish goes cloudy when wet, so overall it mostly looked a bit peculiar. In the end, I decided to go for a solid colour, and the decks are now green, and swmbo and I think they look pretty good.
The final result is that they do keep most of the water out: we get the odd drip although that's mostly condensation from the portholes. Last summer of course when everything went a bit mad and there was a strange big hot yellow thing in the sky for a change, the planking shrank a bit and the leaks started again, albeit on a much smaller scale than before. Captain Tolley thankfully sorted them out. We repaint the deck annually and it does pretty much do the trick (the paint is expensive though).
Apart from sharing experiences and getting a bit of early morning typing practice, a point of this thread is to pose a question too, and that is the old chestnut of: is it really possible to stop wooden decks leaking???
Where swmbo and I differ about the deck is that I think that if I ever had some spare money - however unlikely that might be - I'd like to replace the deck and would probably go for plywood with a glass mat covering, using the woven glass that hopefully would end up looking like canvas when painted. Chal is what might be called a "smack yacht" and canvas deck covers would have been pretty common on such boats. I would hope this would finally stop all the leaks and reduce maintenance to a lick of normal deck paint when it looked worn. Swmbo on the other hand thinks this would be sacrilege: we would loose the pattern of the planks which is still clearly visible, and old wooden boats are supposed to have the odd leak.
What does the panel think?
This is what the deck looks like now (actually at its worst after last summer's heatwave, so you can see some caulking mess around a few of the seams):
and this is what is underneath (at the end of the repair process):
Last edited:
