Tek-dek = boat lino

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tcm

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In the interests of balance - has anyone seen this stuff? Gag! It's awful awful awful. Primarily synthetic so, instead of maturing nicely like a natural material, it gets old and knackered and not much can be done about it. Style-wise it's hopeless - look at all the bigger boats and not a *single* one has faux teak decks. If you want to go very fast, get bigger engines and lose the teak altogether. Otherwise, get the real thing - real champagne, real diamonds, real leather, real teak.
 
Tek-Dek does not age, it stays the same, it is UV stable and stain resistant therefore does not look old and knackered, it LOOKS NEW ALL THE TIME!!! The straw colour which everyone is fond of. TCM - you stress me out
 
One of Tek deks advantages is that when wet it has a higher coefficient of friction than when dry - i.e. better grip so it is good for the swim platform (but perhaps not so comfortable to sit on!
 
TCM,

I beg to differ. I like the stuff on smaller boats. It looks and works well on Sportsfishers like the sub 25ft range and is nice on the swim platforms of Sub 30fts. Would I fit it to a new 34ft boat....no. would I fit it to a new 28ft boat...yes. If you buy a Jag X type, 3 series or C Class you do not need leather. And do you think the Carbon Fibre/Stainless steel/wood dash is real and not plastic on these models? If you buy a bigger Jag/Marc or BMW it must have real leather, real wood etc cos that is what other buyers want and so protects reasale.

I think Tek Dek has its uses, and with Young kids dropping Beans all over the place I would prefer Tek Dek to real teak which stains too easily. I also think Tek Dek looks better than white GRP floors and does not get hot like real Teak (sore feet).

So I am for this inovative product, on the right boat and well fitted.

Paul /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif
 
ah but that's where you're wrong.

It has to be possible to work and cut the material, and that very property means that it can be damaged by dropping things on it and that denty damage is unlike the real thing that it tries and fails to imitate.

A further fault is the uniformity of the product. No realistic variations of all the matched pieces as with real wood, each plank different yet combining to form a unified whole. It's just yard after yard of the same thing, like wallpaper, and that's the reason why it can't really be put down in anything other than in quite small areas.

Surely anyone who prefers tek dek because it "stays new all the time" might also be interested in inflatable women/men instead of the real thing. After all, the inflatable ones look new all the time, don't they?
 
Ah but you're being all evenhanded which is not what this thread is about. The thread is to rebalance the one-sided views of tekdek put about recently.

Back to the swim platform: tek dek might well have a better coefficient of friction than newly planed teak. But what about nice and normally aged-a-bit teak which has a few ridges, hm? Tek dek will be much more slippery than that.
 
OK. Though it seems to me that you firmly place it as an acceptable but nevertheless *inferior* product to the genuine article. Like linoleum as a floorcovering in house or office building I suppose.
 
I disagree (again) with you TCM, the durability of Tek-Dek is far beyond that of real Teak, if you drop something on Tek-Dek its Plasticisers and memory mean it will bounce right back to where it started, you can also stab and slash the material and it will seal itself, obviously not if you put a hole right through it, it won't. As to being uniform, its extruded metre by metre with a coloured pigment, this allows us to add a grain effect throughout the material, so, if you were inclined to change the decks surface get a belt sander and take the top 1mm off and you will have a totally different deck to that of which you started.
 
He has a point, Matt. We had the stuff on the old Targa 29, and I stripped a starter motor on it. The deck was covered in dents, oil and filth, but a scrub with petrol and a wire brush brought it up fine. It was also cut resistant i.e. you could cut it with a Stanley knife once it was down, but it didn't show.

I agree with you, however, that the standard Tek-Dek is not that convincing, but I'd be intereted to see the 'pro' version.
 
bouncing and plasticisers? It's sounding less and less like teak and more like seaside rock.

Each piece is nice and new, isn't it? So the bits right at the edge and right in the middle of a walkway are all the exactly same. That's not how a natural product appears.

With plasticisers, it can't help but have a homogeneity that again is unnatural and more like plastic, cool and sticky underfoot. Not warm and absorbent like real teak.
 
[ QUOTE ]
Surely anyone who prefers tek dek because it "stays new all the time" might also be interested in inflatable women

[/ QUOTE ]

well on the basis that few cosmetic surgeons are poor one must conclude tek dek has a future................ /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
 
Actually, it gets hot as hell in the sun - much more so than teak does. Horses for courses. Me, I'm getting those new-fangled diesels taken out and replaced with a more traditional triple expansion steam engine, complete with real brasswork (none of the fake plastic stuff you get on modern engines).
 
OK. Though your new boat (over 30 feet) has teak, dunnit, and i don't hear of any plans to rip it out and replace with tekdek.

You can get oil and gunk out of real teak too. And perhaps the quality of the real teak surface is such that you'd have been more protective of it in the first place?
 
Tek-Dek flexible is now lighter than it used to be, it used to be a really dark (non-teak like) effect, but it has all changed!! Your Targa would look different with the new light coloured Tek-Dek, the proffessional Tek-Dek has exactly the same properties as the flexible, it just looks like brand spanking new Teak, with a grain, with real wood fibres
 
Why would anyone with a plastic boat bother with real teak.
It's an imtation deck for cosmetic purposes only. It splits, cracks, lifts, leaves holes in the deck and is generally not worth the trouble. Tek- Dek will outlast teak without the need for hundreds of holes in the GRP to hold it in place.
Teak on plastic doesn't make sense!
 
Nice dark navy blue carpet works for me. Leave outboards on it, drip a little oil on it, drop tools on it: quick hoover every now and again, and heave-ho, buy a new one every three years...

Despite everyone saying how easy real teak is to keep looking good (and I don't mean oiled to death), most boats with teak decks over 5yrs old that I have seen have that "just like a park bench" green algae/mould thing going.

dv.
 
Ah, so tekdek has a lower sp heat cappacity so presumably hotter in summer, colder in winter. Whereas real teak is less able to hold heat on hot days, and less readily pulls heat from you on colder days.

Reagrding the steam engine replacement of diesel -that's not valid. Diesels are more powerful with better range and reliabilty, and issue of performance and function.

With a teak deck, we are talking about something which is almost entirely dedicated to "look and feel", almost entirely decorative, aside from the need for it to be not slippery underfoot.

If you *did* have a boat with steam power -would you even contemplate tek dek? Or teak?
 
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