The Teak Deck Nightmare
We all know that teak deck looks amazing, there is nothing like the feel of the wood on your feed as a nonskid , the waterproof the color and the vibe of the teak are hard to beat , but after 40 years of sea life a teak deck can become a nightmare, and to be fair the problem isn’t the teak itself, is the almost 4000 screw used to attached the wood to the deck that after some years they let moisture get into the inner deck core , leaks and soft deck eventually become a fact. one of the thing i loved about our Mason was the beautiful teak deck we have, it looked a little worm but i was confident that with some love and care we could be able to bring it back to the original glory… Until we have our first rain a suddenly we were surrounded by leaks that we didn’t have a clue where they were originating.
One day we were installing a new set of cleats and we found out that some of the inner deck was a little wet so i pulled a plank to inspect wtf was going on few minutes later i was with a crowbar pulling every plank of wood cuz i was decided to eliminate those leaks, we spend over 2 weeks removing teak, black silicon and thousands of screw from the deck. then more weeks of labor came when we had to drill holes on the deck chasing for wet core, heating the holes with a heat gun to have the moisture to drain out and removing the wet areas after everything was dry we filled the holes and inner deck with epoxy using syringes then patching and sanding every inch of the deck, after almost 2 months of prep work it was time to laminate the deck with new fiberglass.
To improve the water flowing away from our deck hardware my dad came up with the idea to elevate every deck hardware with a half-inch of fiberglass custom made mounts to keep the bolting holes above the water drain.
A mix of epoxy resin and aerosil was used to fill and smooth the deck, countless hours of sanding and hand sculpting this mounts were needed to get all the pieces in place , after grinding we clean the deck with acetone to apply 3 coats of gelcoat to seal the deck, it important to add a little of paraffin wax to the gelcoat to properly cure and make it sandable , for the final coat we mixed an Air dry clear-coat Additive to improve the curing performance and final shinny look of the gelcoat.
The Original wood boxes used for the ventilation were replaced by custom made fiberglass ones , we glue this one to the deck to avoid the need of using screws and minimize posible leaksFor the non-skid and after some research we decided to go with Kiwi-Grip.