Recutting teak deck caulking groove

[Peter]

Due to wear on our teak deck, the caulk groves are nearly flush with the deck. Any ideas on how to recut the grove. As there are a few to recut need some mechanical means i.e. router. But how to guide it when cutting the grove. The teak is approx 30mm thick so has no issue of loss of thickness.

Regards

Peter

 

[Tradewinds]

Suggest you PM ccscott49

I believe he did this very job recently.

 

[jfm]

I've seen it done by making a guideplate that you screw/bolt to the bottom plate of the router, and on the guideplate you make a lip/rail that will run in the existing caulking groove. The lip would be say 6mm x 3mm x 75 long, if your caulking is 6mm wide and you have 3mm remaining depth. You obviously have to dig out the old caulking first, to use this method

Some magazine somewhere had an illustrated article on doing this, and I'll try to find it and email it to you. Poster BartW has it, because a year or two ago I scanned it in colour and emailed it to him, and I know he has kept it. He's a helpful guy so feel free to PM him

The other method is to make a guide batten along whose edge you can run the router in the normal way. So long as the guide batten is screwed to the deck using screws that pass thru the next or next-but-one/two adjacent caulking seam, the screw hole "damage" won't matter becuase the holes get filled with new caulk, and in your case you have lots of depth to play with. With a suitably sized softwood guide batten you can screw it down curved, if your deck planks are curved.

Good luck anyway

 

[martinaskey]

Peter, recaulked my teak deck last winter (1966 mahogany S&S 36)
Sounds like you have a traditional teak deck, mine was 1/2" teak on 1/2" ply.
With a 30mm depth you probably have bigger seams than on my boat so my technique might not be applicable but ..............
Used a Worx vibrating tool for the job - similar things available from Fein, Bosch etc..
Removed the caulk using the Fein cutter attachment - worked well.
Then recut the seams to 5mm deep using a diamond coated segment saw on the same tool. Didn't use a guide as the remains of the original seams did this for me and vibrating tools don't 'walk' like a router. Worked well.
considered the router option but there are several problems - a batten would be essential (very difficult to control a router freehand and one slip ...), but also very difficult to access edges and tight corners

Martin

 

[pelissima]

I also did this a couple of years ago. I used a router with small footprint (dewalt).
I also used a batten 5mm thick and about 50mm long as a guide which I squeezed vertically into the first groove with the help of a hammer. That first one I made it painfully and manually and do not remember how. If I was doing it now, I would use the Fein for the first groove but the rest is clearly a router's job once the guide and/or spacers are adjusted.