Well, as proof of concepts go it was painful but worth while. I’ve almost finished my tiny little section of teak re-caulking. Two small panels on either side of the wheel in the cockpit and the driver’s seat were the targets. Easy to work on…and usually covered by cushions.
Re-caulking teak is a hideous, awful job. Getting the teak out is painstaking. Using a Fein Multimaster with a special teak blade helps, but that doesn’t really get the very small and fine pieces of old caulk out. And you need to get every little scrap of caulk out.
So the next step is to go back with a 1/8th inch chisel, some small picks, razors, and hobby knives to get every little scrap of caulk out. A bright light is helpful to show you how much you missed right after you think you are done. I am temped to get reading glasses to magnify the work area for the next time.
Once you have the caulk as out as it will get then you sand the grooves and clean them with acetone. At this point if you are patient (which I am not) you can mask all of the teak off. Or you could just mask the corners and edges where the Evil Caulk will get on the boat.
The caulk is nasty stuff. It’s worse than the gook that drowned all the mammoths in LaBrea; in fact when I’d finished caulking it looked like one of those mammoths had crawled out of the tar pits and through my cockpit. It’s thick, it’s sticky, it’s impossible to get out of your skin and it happily sticks to anything it can. It also cures permanently; if your snazzy caulk gun blows the back off a tube of caulk you can count on it being permanently cured into one piece where the caulk got sucked back into the gears.
The trick with the caulk is to FILL the grooves and keep it moving at just the right speed. Then you run over the top of it with a putty knife to scrape off the excess so you can get it all over your hands, your pants, your tools and the rest of the boat. Once the caulk is applied you need to let it cure for a couple of days.
The final step is to sand. The sanding is cut down if you take a sharp chisel and run it through your thumbs so you bleed profusely. Actually what you are supposes to do is lightly slice off the excess caulk from the top of the wood so you have less sanding to do. You are supposed to do this without gouging the wood, though your thumb is OK so long as you can avoid bleeding all over the teak.
The final results? Not bad for my first attempt. It’s not totally done, but I’ve completed enough to show that I can do it without completely screwing the job up. Of course, I’ve also demonstrated that I think I can spend two to four hours per day working on this job and never finish it since the teak will be ready to re-caulk by the time I get back to where I started.
If you look closely you can see where I failed to fill all the seams, and where I got a little to excited with the Fein Multimaster.
