Teak Deck Renovation

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geoffcollins

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Hello

I have been looking a boat today that has a teak deck that requires a bit of work. The broker advided that at some point soon it would require:

The sikaflex / caulk removing
Running a router along the grooves (to gain a bit of depth apparently)
Light sanding of the decks
Recaulking
Any missing plugs replacing

Has anyone been through this process on a 34ish foot boat that could give me some general indication of the cost?

Cheers

Geoff
 
I wonder if that is all it needs. How thick is that teak? If it so worn down in places that the seams need routing to gain enough depth to re caulk them I think that "light sanding" is a bit of an understatement. At best you are going to end up with a deck of pretty uneven thickness, at worst you will end up replacing the lot. IMHO a teak deck is a large repair bill waiting to happen, and as a Mediterranean sailor I just don't want one.
 
Your looking at about £25000 to replace it, I did my decks this winter, it wasn't that hard to do, once you have every thing in place.and the planks are deep enough
 
I'd have somebody who knows teak decks to have a look at it for you, if it's on a fibreglass boat, then the teak will have been very thin even when new, you may not have enough teak left to deepen the grooves and deepen the screw hooles and re-plug. Nobody here can tell you without seeing it sorry.
I wouldnt believe one word any broker told me, you need an expert/surveyor.
 
I assume Rich is saying that a yard job is £25k please don't tell me he spent that on materials.

Get a quote from a yard. It is bound to be frightening. If you are prepared to put up with the hassle adjust your offer accordingly. If not accepted I would walk away. Plenty of others on the market.

As others have said, a teak deck is a potential problem for all boats. Lovely though it is, I would never have one again.
 
A couple did this DIY and it was featured in PBO last year I think.

I am sure they said it cost them £20K and took forever.

If the broker's saying 'all it needs is' I would go for the costs suggested around £25K in your calculations and value your own labour to be reflected in your offer
 
Suppose it depends whether you want to go sailing or not .. Its alot of work .. Depends how much time you have .. If you need a router then its worn out and needs replacing .. Ever tried keeping a router on track .. There will be miles of it and what about the bits you cannot get to with the router ..Find something that you sail NOW .. Rather than spend every weekend repairing .. or do you want to get away from <span style="color:red"> SWMBO </span> /forums/images/graemlins/ooo.gif /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif
 
Forget the router, if there is any caulk left it will burn the cutter. Seen that done. And, as said, how do you track it?
`bout 10 yrs ago, I sourced some teak (app. £150) and SP resin+ graphite (10kg?) got a local carpenter to saw the teak into 40x6mm strips This was enough for a 27ft 60´s boat. Messy but nice job when sanded. £25k sounds a LOT. Mine were not UK prices though, Iberia.
Andrew
 
[ QUOTE ]
I assume Rich is saying that a yard job is £25k

[/ QUOTE ] A mate had a quote from a yard last year,for a 35footer well over £20,000 I added a bit for inflation.
 
If you are serious about ocean sailing Thailand and Malaysia do excellent teak decks. Had mine replaced on an Aphrodite 42 in Thailand 3 years ago for less than UK 5000. All screw holes filled, cap rail replaced and decks glues. In fact all teak on the deck and surrounds was replaced. Nice job. No complaints
 
A genuine consideration, as a joiner and cabinet maker I can confirm the cost of teak has absolutely rocketed in the last few years, the figures quoted here 20k + do not seem unreasonable.
 
Long post I''m afraid, but it should answer your questions and give a guide to going about it . . .

Re-Caulking a Teak Deck
In 1999 I needed to re-furbish the deck of RAPAZ, my 1988 Oyster 406. The deck had to be re-screwed, and all the seams had to be re-caulked. Screwing was straightforward, but re-caulking was beyond my experience. I was wintering in Port Solent, so I sought advice from Adrian White, a local surveyor. He persuaded me that DIY was perfectly feasible for someone unskilled, if they had time.
He was right, and his help saved me many thousands of pounds. So if you have a ten-year-old teak deck and time on your hands, here’s the story.

The Need
Teak laid decks, while beautiful, deteriorate. Enthusiastic cleaning by proud owners bleaches or scrubs the surfaces away, exposing screw heads and hard lines of grain. Ultra-violet crazes the caulking, which develops pinholes that grow with time. Frost completes the work. Water seeps through and freezes, ultimately levering planks off the deck.

When I bought RAPAZ she was eight years old. Much of her life had been spent in Australia. She’d lost 2 to 3mm of the original 10mm deck, and many screws were showing. Of the caulking, the surveyor’s report was clear: “synthetic seaming shows much aeration and should be replaced”. Re-furbishing the deck was top of next winter’s job list.

The yard manager sucked his teeth and shook his head. “Hmmm. Lot of work. Need to be under cover. Just re-seaming will be £10,000, £15,000 or so. We could replace the whole deck mind you – for about £20,000 or £25,000”. That was a good incentive for DIY. Adrian agreed to advise me, and wrote up a schedule of work.

The steps were clear. Strip all fittings off the decks, make sure the deck planks were all sound (some of mine had to be replaced, but that’s another story), scrape out the old caulking, clean up and prepare the grooves for re-filling, fill the grooves, then level the deck by sanding. As they say, the devil was in the detail.

Planning
RAPAZ was brought ashore, and a cover tent built for the winter. I then spent a couple of days removing all the deck furniture – guard rails and their mountings, cleats, various deck eyes and beauty plates. I balked at the genoa tracks; the internal nuts had been glassed in. But everything else came off.

I measured up the deck (RAPAZ was just over 12m) and found that 360 metres of seaming had to be replaced. Seams were 5mm wide, 7mm deep, and would need some 50 tubes of 310ml caulking, about £600 allowing for a bulk discount. Estimations like this aren’t very accurate though, so a sale or return deal was important.

There are many suppliers of specialist deck caulking products. Boat Life and Sikaflex were locally available. I settled for Sikaflex 290DC, mainly on the basis that it had such excellent literature on how to apply the stuff. I found that professionals use air guns and larger tubes, but I couldn’t find an easy local supply, and settled for the more labour intensive hand guns.

Other materials needed were 500ml acetone, some xylene thinners, three tins of primer (very expensive at £30 per 250 ml!), release tape to run along the bottom of the grooves, 600m of 25mm masking tape, disposable gloves and loads of kitchen roll, about £120 all together.

Removing the Old Stuff
I had seen a deck being re-furbished at Fox’s yard in Ipswich. Removing the old stuff looked pretty easy then. Young lads prised up a bit of the old caulking then just walked along pulling it out metre by metre. No such luck on RAPAZ, where every millimetre had to be cut out and scraped clean.
Decent tools to do the job were essential. “Use a bent file tang or a router”, said Adrian. Routers were beyond my experience, so I asked the local metal fabrication shop if they could bend the tangs of some of their scrapped files for me. Two pints and £5 later I had four files, whose bent tangs I ground in two shapes, one shape for cutting, and one for scraping. Tools were pulled towards you, and steered by altering the angle of the file handle. Sharpening the tangs was a daily grind, which made the job much easier. Tungsten carbide blades would last better, saving sharpening time.

Even with good tools the work was a painstaking slog. First there were two rough cuts to remove most of the material, then careful scraping to remove every last trace of the old stuff from the teak – essential if the new caulking was to adhere well. The best pace I could manage was about 16m of seam per 7-hour day – 22 working days or so to clean out the whole deck. That seemed a bore to me; I would become over-skilled. Sunsail’s personnel department helped out by sending me John, a summer staff member looking for casual winter work. Together we cleaned the caulking out in just less than three weeks. My domestic vacuum cleaner was just powerful enough to suck the scrapings from the grooves. A commercial cleaner would have been quicker.

It’s worth noting that our planks were laid 5mm apart, screwed onto a bed of epoxy resin. The caulking was stuck to the bottom of the groove as well as the sides, and this made cleaning particularly slow. Modern practice is different. Planks are butted together, with a groove routed along the top half of the join. Caulking is separated from the bottom of the groove by release tape. This is much easier to clean out. There’s a third style you may find – planks laid, touching at the bottom, with a top V groove filled with caulking. These V grooves will have to be routed out to make a parallel sided channel for synthetic caulking materials – outside my experience I’m afraid.

Preparing to Caulk.
Preparing to caulk involved four stages; masking the top deck surfaces with tape, de-oiling the teak along the sides of the grooves with acetone soaked cloth, then painting the clean grooves with primer, and finally, flooring the groove with release tape. The release tape allows caulking to stretch and squeeze more easily as planks swell and contract with heat and moisture.

There was a snag – the time between priming and caulking was not to exceed 24 hours. After a bit of time and motion study it became clear that I’d have to call in more help and split the job into four sessions. Masking, degreasing and priming were straightforward, but applying the release tape was fiddly and time-consuming. So a convivial day’s activity was planned for three regular crew members. They prepared a quarter of the deck for caulking each session. Productivity was lower than average after lunch . . . next day John and I filled the prepared grooves.

Filling the Grooves
Filling the groves was obviously going to be a messy job, so we set ourselves up with loads of kitchen roll, disposable gloves and plenty of plastic bags for empty tubes, dirty kitchen roll and other rubbish. The good leaflet told us that application temperatures should be between 5°C and 25°C, and preferably falling. What it didn’t say was that, at 10°C, you needed forearms like a pair of whisky kegs to squeeze anything out of the tube.

After an hour, with only two tubes squeezed and wrists numb with pain, we re-assessed the situation. “Let’s warm the tubes up,” said John. We did. That helped. “More” said John. We did. That helped more. We laid a heap of tubes in front of the fan heater and brought them up to about 35°C. Each was snapped quickly into the squeeze gun and wrapped in a towel to keep it warm. Wonderful! The caulking flowed into the grooves with no effort at all. We checked with Sikaflex – “Ah, yes. That’s how most people do it. What matters is the temperature of the surface you’re filling – that shouldn’t be over 25°C.”

The routine was quite straightforward after that. Slightly overfill the groove, flatten the caulking down with a putty knife and scrape off the surplus. Keep moving so you always apply new caulking to a ‘wet’ edge. We planned each day’s filling so that no ‘dry edges’ were left behind. What a mess though. Even with the greatest of care black splodges would appear on GRP, clothes, shoes, faces, wherever
Curing time was quoted as 4 to 7 days, so we caulked at weekends, allowing the previous work to cure before the convivial preparation sessions re-started. To prevent the masking tape hardening on, I pulled it off the day after caulking.

Finishing Off
When the tape came off the deck looked awful. There were dirty epoxy glue patches every 30cm where the screws had been re-set (1440 screws if you want to know). And black gunge had spread over the teak wherever the masking tape had lifted. Patches of masking tape glue remained. Yuk.

Three days vibrating with a tiddly 500W random orbital sander (fitted with 40 grit disks) converted this mess into a gleaming new yellow teak deck. 500W wasn’t man enough for the job. Mask and goggles kept most of the dust out, but next time I’d hire something bigger with a good vacuum dust extractor, probably saving a day or two, though a smaller sander is still needed for cramped corners.

Cost?
It was 1999. I bought in about 5 man/weeks of labour for the caulking, and added about 7 man/weeks of my own time. So re-caulking the teak deck of a 40ft yacht was (at worst) a 12-man/week job for two ignorant tyros advised by an expert.

I paid £554 for the winter tent, £750 on caulking materials and £200 for relevant advice. So the whole re-caulking job cost me £2,000, including labour. That saved me over £8,000 for 7 weeks of my time; good wages, especially when it’s not paid out of taxed income!

My deck now had another seven or eight years of life and a couple of wobbly grooves. Maybe a professional would have avoided those - he'd have used a router. The guide? The parallel groove, but you'll still need those scrapers for the first groove and awkward corners.

As to using those scrapers, since then I've seen a windscreen replacement artist at work. I wish I'd seen that before starting - my scrapers would have been much better designed!
 
Forget scrapers, for the main part of the stripping, invest in a fein multimaster, with the special caulking removing tools, plus rent a compressor for the air powered caulking gun, which you can buy at reasonable cost, which will save you days of work and save on materials, because its so controlable. But as I've already said, you need an expert to look at the decks first. Then decide what to do. They may wee be stuffed!
 
yes, second all the above excellent write up.
I had to resort to cutting each side of the caulking with a stanley knife then pulling and lifting out the old stuff with the aid of a file tang.
One caution is that some sections where the original caulking had come unstuck had solidified grime and gunge stuck betwean the teak and the caulking, it is essential to remove this or your new caulking won't adhere and the muck is still porous so you have an instant leak! I used the sharpened side of a chisel for this tedious but essential job.
Breaker tape also essential and preparation just as above.
 
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