Progress continues slowly in the teak scraping department. Memorial Day weekend was spent sitting on the dock with a tarp clamped to the side of the boat while I scraped and scraped. I timed myself and I can get about 2 feet of the toe rail and side trim scraped in an hour. Two feet in One. Whole. Hour.
Our boat is 37 feet long straight across the middle, the boat is curved, so there’s probably about 39 linear feet of teak on each side. Do the math…carry the 1…and it equals a shitload of hours scraping teak. And this is only the first step! We still need to clean and sand everything. I’ve been trying to get about an hour or so of scraping done after work, but the wind has been kicking around here and the scraped Cetol bits go flying into the water and making a royal mess.
The other fun thing I’ve been doing is freaking out at the spiders that come jumping out at me while I sit on the dock scraping. The bottom piece of trim has a groove on the bottom side. It’s a spider’s haven in this groove. The spiders in this area are big and black and fast. When I get too close to them with the heat gun they come flying out of the groove and run around the tarp. I shriek, jump up and run around trying to get away. I can’t step on them because I don’t have shoes on. Then I realized I have a great weapon in my hand. It’s even called a gun. Now before I settle down in my two foot area for an hour, I hold the heat gun up to the groove and scare all the spiders out. Then I burn them dead and push them into the water. In the short length of teak I’ve scraped I’ve killed exactly six of these big, black spiders. It’s not very dignified but it gets the job done.
We are STILL not sure what we’re going to use as a final treatment on the teak. I hate to admit it, but we’re seriously considering going back to Cetol (I can’t believe I just wrote that, but its true). Cetol is supposed to be just so darn easy to apply and take care of, but the trick is you HAVE to take care of it. One missed yearly application of glossy overcoat and the whole thing will turn to shit. Cetol also makes a new color now. Instead of the regular version (which is like brown paint) or the light version (which is like orange paint), they have a natural teak version that’s more yellow (or maybe it’s more like yellow paint).
Honey Teak by Signature Finish, which I spoke about in an earlier post, is our second pick (this week anyway). It’s a two-part mix; three coats of Honeycoat followed by three coats of Crystalcoat. The directions sound a little more difficult to apply than the Cetol (mix x parts of A with x parts of B and maybe a bit of part C if you’re feeling lucky, then brush it on but don’t let it dry completely before the next coat. And oh yeah, the pot time is 6 hours. Then mix the top coat using this mathematical formula and don’t forget to scuff the surface between coats, but only if you let it dry completely.) But the reviews for Honey Teak are all excellent. People love this stuff. So we’re torn on what to do because, by god, we’re only doing this whole thing once and we want to get it right.