Caution: Viewer Warning!
The following images and descriptions may be considered offensive and sacrilegious. For those who worship teak decks and hold them in almost mystical adoration, you should probably just hit the back key at this point. You have been warned!
For those of you brave enough to have ventured forward, the above pic is / was the back deck of my trawler. The teak deck looked to have worn down between 1/3 and 1/2 from it's original thickness. I don't want any exterior wood to maintain and I really don't like walking on teak decks especially with bare feet. So the back deck needed to be converted to fiberglass. Hey Sean, "can we just glass over the teak?" Not really a good idea (that's as close to "no" as he gets with me). The teak overlaps the gutter around the perimeter and delamination issues over such a large area using polyester concerned him. Sean's answer, "why don't you just peel up the teak from the deck" (think I detected a slight smile).
Ok, so how tough can this be. The teak deck covering looked to have been assembled off the boat, glued on the deck, and screwed / plugged around the perimeter, around the hatch opening, and on the hatch. Job 1 pull all the screws. So first you gouge out the wood plug. The hole has epoxy covering the screw head that held the plug in. With a center punch and hammer I chip as much out as possible. The screw heads take a square drive. So I beat with a hammer a square driver into the screw head. Then remove the driver blow out the shards of epoxy. Keep repeating the process until the driver engages the screw, it can be turned with a tee handle, and removed. It took 3 to 5 minutes per screw for 60 screws. To peel up the teak, I took a flat bar with a sharpened edge and tried to chisel up the teak. The teak would shatter a little, but held firm. Hey Sean, "what do I do now?" Sean's response, "have you ever used a hand held electric planer?"
So the planer shaves about 1/8" with each pass. Have to wear a mask for all the air borne teak dust. After 20 passes blow the dust and shavings out of the planer to keep it from over heating. Was getting pretty good at it till I found the 1 screw I had missed......and cut the power cord in half.
A day and a half, 2 sets of planner blades, and the power cord later, the teak was gone. 2 1/2 thirty gallon trash cans of teak shavings went into the dumpster.
Next Sean sanded off the remaining adhesive, drilled and filled the screw holes, and did a little leveling to prepare the deck for 2 layers of bi-axial cloth and polyester. Since he was glassing down, he was able to lay out both layers of cloth with offsetting seams and wet them both out at the same time.
The deck is raised with guttering going around the perimeter. In 2 opposite corners there are drains in the gutter that remove water regardless of the pitch of the deck. The deck hatch also has gutters. You can see brown strips that cover the channels going from the hatch guttering to the deck guttering. This is a really nice setup that sheds water from the deck quickly.
After lightly sanding, the deck received several coats of gel coat as fairing coating.
Ted
