Mike
07/15/2009, Deltaville, VA

July 14th... Deltaville, VA

Yet another day of teak....however 95 percent of the scraping and sanding are done. In the morning we finished sanding the teak in the cockpit. We removed the floor and took it below where Kathy worked on it and the table. She got one last load of laundry done during breaks. She applied finished to the cockpit wood, floor, and table before lunch and then took the car to run some errands.

On our return, I sat in the shade for about 90 minutes and then we started with the third coat on our toe and rub rails.

Our goal from the beginning was to get the teak sanded and partially finished by the time we were scheduled to fly back to Michigan. It's been a ton of work but things are beginning to look better.

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Kathy
07/15/2009, Deltaville, VA

Okay, Mike typed up this whole big thing about the process of doing teak-scraping, sanding, brushing it on, etc. I'm sure Sam won't mind if I don't put that all in here.

So, in copying form his dying computer to mine, I screwed up wildly and lost it. So unlike me. Suffice it to say, we worked on teak most of the day. I did some laundry and deep down inside boat cleaning (yuck).

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Mike
07/15/2009, Deltaville, VA

July 12... Deltaville, VA

Our goal for the day was to finish the sanding and get a coat of finish on everything. There were a few hurdles in our way however. One was that we had to quit at 4pm to get cleaned up for dinner with friends at 5. Another was that it was above 90 degrees from 10 am on hitting 94 at 1pm. The last was that there were thunderstorms in the forecast.

After coffee I started sanding. Kathy cleaned up last nights dishes and picked up the boat. Trying to put off sanding until the latest moment, she did another load of laundry. By then it was time for breakfast. After cleaning up the breakfast dishes, we got her set up with a sander.

By lunch time we still had about an hour and a half of sanding and taping ahead of us but finished just as things were beginning to cloud up. We checked the radar and storms were well north of us so we applied a coat of finish to the remaining teak and hoped that it would dry to touch before we got wet.

I don't know if I've discussed the process that we're using so I'll give you the run down.
First I scrape the old finish off the teak. Sometimes a heat gun us used with the scraper sometimes it isn't necessary. Next, we hit the scraped area with a course sanding using either the random orbital or the mouse sander, depending on how much space we have. Then we do some fine sanding and finally we tape the area off. I have a plank between two step ladders and can do an area about 10 feet long at a time.

In three days of work we have done 160 feet of rub rail, 90 feet of toe rail, 60 feet of eyebrow and three of the four hand rails. We have used over 500 feet of masking tape and who knows how many sheets of sand paper.

It did rain but the finish had dried enough by then that if was fine.

We got cleaned up and at 5:00 were picked up by Tom and Cathy from "Perseverance II" and drove about 15 miles to a really nice German restaurant. I had a bratworst sampler plate and Kathy had one of the specials which was a pork shank that had cooked all afternoon. We had a very nice meal and got caught up with Tom and Cathy's adventures getting home. We'll see them again when we get back from Michigan.

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