When Caulking Comes Before Planking

ARROW, which I designed based on L. Francis Herreshoff’s ARAMINTA and built in 1998, has been in continuous use since then. Now in the hands of a new owner, she came back to my shop last fall for what you might call cosmetic or aesthetic work. Most of this was straightforward—repainting the deck and renewing its nonskid surface, stripping old varnish off the cabinsides and cockpit coamings to renew its luster with six new coats of varnish, and repainting the topsides. But it was also clear that the time had come to replace the teak cockpit seats and cockpit sole. These were originally made of 1⁄4"-thick teak planks 4" wide, edge-glued to each other and then glued down to a plywood substrate. Seventeen years of continuous use had worn the teak paper-thin in places, and the edges of the teak had chipped around the hatches. In other spots, the teak was wearing down close to the glueline. Sanding would have rejuvenated the appearance, and the owner could have gotten maybe another season out of it, but sanding would have taken off even more thickness. Sooner or later, there would be a risk of wearing through to the plywood below. Replacement was the best course. Originally, the teak veneers in ARROW’s cockpit didn’t have caulking seams. The veneers were simply epoxied together to appear as a single, wide piece. They were laid up over a meranti plywood substrate made up of two 3⁄8" layers for the seats and one 1⁄2" layer for the cockpit sole. These substrates, coated as they were with epoxy, were still in very good shape, so the new owner and I saw a chance to not only make repairs but to improve the aesthetics by using 3⁄8"-thick and 13⁄4"-wide teak strips with 1⁄4"-wide caulking seams filled with black caulking compound. The new look would be first-rate, much like a traditional laid deck, and would complement all the effort put into renewing the brightwork. This resheathing was the most challenging part of the project. But we greatly simplified the work by making up sections of decking ahead of time, off the boat. We made accurate patterns of the areas to be sheathed, then made up slightly oversized deck sections of individual planks separated by a uniform 1/4", then filled these seams with adhesive caulk made by Teak Deck Systems. After a couple of days of curing, the individual deck sections could be handled very much like plywood panels, which allowed us to focus on accurate planning and cutting. Vacuum-bagging is a great way to install this kind of sheathing, and making up caulked panels ahead of time simplifies the work. If we were vacuum-bagging individual planks to be caulked later, the epoxy would partly fill the seams, and then somebody would have to come back with a tool to clean out the cured glue before caulking. By making the whole panel up on the bench, all we have to do after vacuum-bagging is to clean up the perimeter. For me, that's the main reason for using this method. [caption id="attachment_1044" align="alignn