Ship-like, non-slip and elegant - for many, a teak deck is still the epitome of a yacht deck. But over the years, the dream can easily turn into a nightmare, because the wooden deck is a wearing part. Its service life depends heavily on the quality of the wood, professional installation and maintenance. But even if everything runs smoothly, a major overhaul is due after 30 years at the latest. The joints often show signs of disintegration much earlier.
Water penetrates and the staves warp, rot from below or are pulled off the deck by the frost in winter. The deck of the 35-year-old LM Mermaid 290 was in a similarly desolate state: the joints were brittle and had come away almost everywhere, and the wood was heavily weathered and washed out. The forecastle looked particularly bad. The fish was cracked and individual bars had bulged.
The first reflex: Everything has to be new! But that would make the boat a total economic loss, because teak is expensive and the installation work takes up many hours of the boat builder's time. If you order a new teak deck with a thickness of 10 millimetres from a shipyard, you can expect to pay around 2200 euros per square metre. This makes it clear that a new deck costs considerably more than the boat is worth.
So let's see what can be saved. The cracked fish has to be replaced, but the remaining substance is not bad: the bars are still 7 to 8 millimetres thick. A conventional overhaul with flexible joint sealant is still out of the question. Not only would the joints have to be milled out, but all the curved bars would also have to be replaced. Subsequent bonding of the deck with epoxy promises significantly less effort. This creates a solid unit that is also bonded to the plastic deck.
We show the work required step by step in the YACHT workshop - in YACHT 5/2021, which is available in stores and online from today and is also available as a digital version.
Hauke Schmidt
Test & Technology editor
