Teak Project On The Way

When Reggie arrived unexpectedly at 10 AM and found me ripping the teak off the starboard cockpit seat he must have realized that I meant business.  When he asked if he could load his tools onto the boat I knew that he meant business too.  The cabin is now full of Reggie's things, including three heavy tool boxes, a box holding what appears to be West System gel coating material, a case of teak caulking cartridges, some power tools,  and a gigantic vacuum cleaner.

I asked him what the vacuum cleaner was for.  He said said for the grinding work.  What grinding work?  He said that the surfaces to take the teak must be ground back past the gelcoat.  Are you grinding down the non-skid surface?  Indeed he will.  Reggie said that there had been two mistakes made in the installation of the teak.  The first was that the gelcoat had not been ground out which explained why whatever glue was used did not stick very well to the surface.  The second mistake was in not grinding off the rough non skid surface that is created during the fiberglass molding process.  This allowed water to work its way through the nooks and crannies underneath the wood, leading to the galvanic corrosion of the screws (not to mention the leaks).  He told me that we were doing the work just in time because there was danger the fiberglass would be damaged by water working its way down the screws and percolating through the fiberglass.  He had checked and fortunately there is no damage at present.

Seats and Step Cleared of Teak

I told him that my goal for the rest of the day was to remove teak from the cockpit seats and the small leading to the companionway.  He said fine, we can remove the teak from the cockpit sole tomorrow.  I did manage to remove the teak from those seats.  Most of the screws were pulled out.  I sheared off those that remained then scrubbed and washed down all of the surfaces.