Hallberg Rassy - teak decks.

[Zing]

The Boat Called Wanda videos are pretty frightening. He’s been at it about 2 years now. A lot of it working on the deck. It is a warning about the risks of screwed down teak decks, especially with a timber or balsa core. More modern boats have the teak glued down instead. The repairs in that case will be massively less involved.

 

[Zing]

The cheapest way to buy teak is to buy it as 50mm x 225mm planks and pay a subcontractor to saw it down and thickness it.

A good tip. Do you know any good sources?

 

[simonfraser]

sure, but vs the youtube vid in #19 i recon that is a no brainer, other than not buying the boat in the first place.
it will still look splendid, another great point about a teak deck.

 

[yerffoeg]

No-one should be buying rainforest teak these days. Use one of the excellent synthetic alternatives.

 

[pvb]

No-one should be buying rainforest teak these days. Use one of the excellent synthetic alternatives.

They're not really any cheaper though.

 

[Daydream believer]

They're not really any cheaper though.

But environmentally more acceptable. I would imagine far easier to fit & less prone to leak when complete.

 

[Daydream believer]

Would Iroko not be a cheap substitute- Sometimes referred to as "African Teak". Available in longer lengths & from a wider range of stockists, so better chance of a more competitive price

 

[pvb]

But environmentally more acceptable. I would imagine far easier to fit & less prone to leak when complete.

No difference in leak susceptibility. A huge percentage of the cost in replacing the deck is labour; the actual cost of materials is not exactly insignificant, but it's relatively small. If you can do the job yourself, and don't mind devoting many months of your life to it, it may be affordable. If you're paying people to do it, maybe less affordable. Remember you've got to start by getting the boat out of the water, mast unstepped, into a shed (or build a waterproof tent over it), all deck fittings removed (often involving removing headlinings), all old teak removed, deck filled and faired, etc, etc. Fit the new deck. Then refit everything, step the mast, launch.

 

[BrianH]

Be aware that obtaining the only teak timber worth having, viz. genuine mature teak, rather than plantation timber, has the risk of involving illegal logging, unless sourced from old teak obtained from ship breakers. That is because plantation teak is typically harvested at between 20-30 years and has little heartwood, the densest and oil-rich part, nor is there the weight of a large tree to compress the cellular growth rings as they form, giving a softer wood that wears faster.

Studies issued by the London think-tank Chatham House, report that 100*m cubic metres of illicit timber are stripped from forests each year. Logging companies over-harvest within the boundaries of legally granted lands or deliberately misidentify prohibited tree species as legal ones. Recent research has now revealed that vast amounts of hardwood, especially from Africa and Asia, even FSC labelled products, were illegally logged and falsely certificated. Burmese and Indian teak is being imported into China as logs on a vast scale, sawn and re-routed around the world wrongly labelled as sourced from certified producers.

A further point is that the accelerating global forest depletion is affecting the climate crisis as trees absorb carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. A recent study (ETH Zurich, Science, July 2019) has shown that tree planting is far more important for carbon reduction than previously thought - not cutting them down. However, a major problem for an international action to plant enough trees, if it could be initiated, would be to ever compensate for the forest loss currently occurring world-wide. The latest scandals of deliberate Amazon forest burning for agricultural land emphasizes that.

Your choice.

 

[yerffoeg]

Well said Barnac1e!

 

[Deleted member 36384]

Well said Barnac1e!

+1