more pictures of the wooden deck

That's what the seams looked like after the first pouring of the glue.
It has already been scraped except the seam of the covering board. You can see little gaps and voids, that are not ideal. They do not look nice and they make it easier for the water to get in.
To fill those little cracks and holes, we used a cheap heatgun to melt the glue in the seams and then poured or rather blew some more glue into the affected areas.
I just cut open an old metal container and bent it to form a nice nozzle. With the heatgun i then was able to blow the glue more or less precisely wherever i wanted it.
Without remelting the glue already in the seams, the new glue wasn't really sticking to it and cracked off quite quickly.

The heatgun was also quite handy when cleaning up after the pouring. In our opinion it was easier to pour more glue into the seams than needed to make sure it is filled. That created a ridge on top of all the seams which needed to be taken off. Just heating it up with the heatgun and then slicing it off with a spatula or an old plane blade worked quite well. It gives a finish like on the picture above on the covering board seam.

And then it's down on your knees and scrape...
We used an old 2" plane blade and a bent and sharpened old file I borrowed from a friend.
The top surface layer of the teak was a bit worn out and was even easier to scrape off after we poured some hot water over it, which also softened the glue.


Here you can see how it looked after the second pouring using heatgun and the small metal container.



















And slowly it starts to look nice...




















The guy I was working for on this project can be found here:
John Edginton at Garron Boatyard in Lawrenny

other things i do

Till i post more pictures of the catamaran project....


I finally finished of a deck today I worked on with colleagues from my boat building college for the last weeks.
Most of the deck planking was still in good condition and just a few short planks on the aft deck needed replacing.



After cleaning out the rebates between the planks, we opened up the seams with a wedge shaped caulking iron. It probably has a better name than that... Dumb Iron is probably the right name for it.
Then cotton went in the seams. Not a lot because the planks were already pretty tight. We then heated up TBS Deck Seam Glue and payed the seams with that sticky stuff.
It is a messy job and after the first few seams we were actually getting a bit worried about this deck being covered in black spots and blobs...
Luckily it scrapes of quite easy. especially if you got this: