Hey, it’s what I’m working on and what is consuming my life from a boat work perspective. And it’s February and I already wrote about the damned ice.
Self portrait of grit and determination as your humble author digs out more teak from the top of the dodger with the Fein Multimaster.
Progress is being made, albeit slowly. To date the cockpit, back deck area behind the cockpit, and the top of the dodger are mostly done. We had to take the solar panels on the dodger had to come off for that. (When I say “we” it means myself and Jeff, my classmate that is helping me on this. He’s putting more hours than me on it right now and doing a great job. Mostly though “we” means Jeff, especially if it involves something lengthy, repetitive and unpleasant.)
By mostly done I mean we had pulled out the existing caulk and gone over it in eye-crossing detail with picks and small chisels to scrape out as much of the old caulk as possible. To change from “mostly done” to “ready for caulking” we still need to sand inside each groove and give it a cleaning out with acetone. We will also mask off the edges and any nearby hardware; between the grooves won’t get masked as the extra foul black caulking compound (and there will be lots, everywhere) on the teak will be sanded off. That sanding is actually fairly easy and it is the only thing the nasty goo does easily.
Right now the toughest part is getting all the little scraps out.
As you can see from the two grooves shown here, one is pretty clear of old caulk. The other, if you look to the left side of the groove the caulk that is still stuck there and needs to be removed is visible. That remaining caulk is actually deeper than it looks since it is between two strips of teak.
We have learned that all of the curved teak surfaces appear to be made from interlocking strips of teak, rather than large planks like the flat surfaces. Without this the curved effect of the surface couldn’t easily happen with a simple plank. This makes the clean out more difficult, because the space between each strip offers a narrow spot for the old caulk to have worked it’s way in to. So you have to use a sharp pick to catch those thin strips and pull them out.
The plan, such as it is, is to hopefully start caulking in April. If we can get the raised parts of the deck “mostly done” by the end of February we might be able to move on to the lower parts of the deck. We’ve got a month for that (unfortunately I must take vacation with the family in the middle of that though Jeff will be forging ahead in my absence). So if all holds there is a reasonable chance this can all get done by late April/early May.
The caulking and sanding actually takes MUCH less time than the prep.
