Springtime Teak Brightwork Refinishing

An unusually dry April in Seattle (driest on record) allowed me to get some brightwork refinishing in. There are only a few items remaining on Apropos that haven’t been stripped down to bare wood and re-finished with Awlwood MA Clear–2 deck boxes, the helm seat, and 4 grab-rails.

I started with the deck boxes. The propane box hadn’t been removed from the deck in over 16 years and was difficult to remove because besides the 4 screws holding it to the deck, there was also what I believe to be 3M 5200 permanent adhesive applied to the 2 teak mounting brackets. I eventually worked it free but had to repair some damage to the plywood bottom of the box using a wood repair product. After removing the lids and hardware from the boxes, I stripped the old varnish with a chemical peeler then scraped, then re-applied more chemical peeler and scraped, then sanded. I decided to try this method instead of the heat gun/scraping method I used on all the other brightwork and it worked well, but I don’t think it saved any time because there was a lot of scraping needed to remove many layers of varnish.

After all the old varnish was removed, I sanded with 120 grit followed by 320 grit, applied the Awlwood Primer, then 8 coats of Awlwood Clear. I cleaned up all the brass and bronze hardware and also sealed them with a clear lacquer before remounting.

Chemical Peeler (used to loosen old varnish before scraping)
Working on the dock
Tops (Teak cleaned, brightened, and sealed with Semco)
Finished Deck Box
Finished Helm Seat
Finished Propane Deck Box
Re-painted propane tanks

There are 4 grab-rails on the coachtop roof. Normally covered with canvas, they came back from the South Pacific trip with sun damage mainly to the bottoms where the canvas doesn’t quite cover. I knew these would require a lot of work to strip the old varnish off because of all the rounded surfaces, so I decided to tackle 2 of them initially. Here are the results:

Base of grab rail showing damage to varnish
Chemical Peeler applied
Lots of Scraping
Finished Grab Rail

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