Your boat better be a real keeper if you plan to take an older
classic vessel and restore the teak decks. If you’re paying someone else to do the entire job, then it’s probably one of those things where “if you have to ask the
price, then you probably can’t afford it”. There are just too many unknown variables. You could get a price on removing the teak or do that yourself. That’s the “easy” part. It’s simple but time consuming. The big issue is what is underneath.
My
project on my
Lord Nelson 41 was quite extensive. It involved removing all deck
hardware,
mast,
rigging, winches, main traveler, staysail tracks,
mast pulpits,
bowsprit,
windlass, hand rails, life-line stanchions, deck fill and pump-out fittings,
helm pedestal and
wiring etc.
Then all the teak was removed. In a way I was lucky. Lord Nelsons are fairly unique in their teak
installation method. The original teak decks were screwed down
but all screws went into underlying fiberglass stringers rather than coring. So I did not run into any coring problems.
Another place where I got lucky was that all
hardware was attached by SS machine screws threaded into SS plates that were embedded into the fiberglass. So I didn’t have to access anything from inside the
cabin, for instance dropping a ceiling panel.
However, even screwing the deck into solid glass doesn’t eliminate all problems 30+ years down the road. I found extensive areas by hammer tapping the deck where the top 1/16”-1/8” of the deck had slight delaminations around the screw holes. Because I wanted a 100% solid foundation for the new teak to be epoxied to, the easiest
route was to use a diamond bit
gelcoat shaver and remove the deck surface all the way down to solid glass. Essentially removing the top 1/8” of the entire deck.
Then a new layer of glass/epoxy was laid down to bring the deck back up to the original height.
Next came the filling and fairing process which included not just the decks but also the
cabin roof and gunwales to remove all dings, scratches and imperfections. The filling and fairing process took the longest. Just depends on how pretty you want it to be. I wanted mine to look like a
new boat.
Then came the primer followed by the
marine finish coats for all the non-teak areas.
Finally, the new teak was installed using epoxy (no screws).
Currently I’m getting ready to reinstall all the removed hardware back onto the deck after a thorough polishing (couldn’t tolerate putting blemished stainless next to new teak).
This has taken me a year and a half so far due to
weather windows. Granted, my boat has a lot of teak and I wanted to restore it to “like new” condition. I’ve done some of the grunt work myself but paid for most of the skilled professional work. My best guess is that if I had paid for everything including the grunt work, the total cost would be about $110k. Of that, probably $35-40k just for the high quality Burmese teak
installation, labor and materials (not the
removal or prep work).
Hope that helps.