Teak handrail work

For the first time in a long time, I have a birthday on a day that I'm NOT working (as in, paid employment). Yep, today I'm 34.

It was a nice day today, and being a weekend, I decided to go do some work on the boat.

I've been looking at the teak handrails for a while and doing a little work to rebed them to prevent additional damage to the interior. I guess you could say that today I had a crazy moment and decided to ruin the nice handrails down below, gut out the plugs and unscrew everything so I could get to the bolts holding down the handrails on the top.

Here is the nicely finished plug down below.

And here's how it looked after I took one of them out.

Everything was going pretty well. Still, it wasn't easy. My hand are hurting from trying to chisle everything out with screw drivers without causing too much damage during the removal.

One of the plugs on top had to be removed in order to stop a nut from spinning with the bolt.

I ended up having to use a painters spatula to wedge it to keep it from moving. At the same time, I was reaching in from below through a port hole to unscrew it.

Here's the handrail sitting in the cockpit.

It'll take some cleaning up to do before I put the handrails back on. These, I can bring back to the house to pull the old varnish off without having to go out to the storage place to work on it at the boat..

Unfortunately, The handrail on the other side was not as cooperative. There were three small handrails down below that I had to chisle out the plugs to get to the screws. Even then, When I worked on the bolts to detach everything, I have one that is spinning freely like the one I mentioned above and three of them are pretty tight and don't want to move and will require a bit more work to get it off. Since I wasn't feeling up to staying at the boat any longer, I thought it best to try again another time, probably next week. All together, I probably spent about 5 hours on all this today. It is not easy work cleaning the plugs out of the handrails.

Another reason I decided to do all this is so I can rebed everything rather than focusing on just where I see damage. This seems to be the first time they will be rebedded in 30 years or so. Then, I have to decide, do I use Butyl tape or Lifecaulk to rebed everything, as this is what I have on hand. Or, as others on the Nor'sea owners group seem to love, Dolphinite, which I also have on hand. I'm not sure of Dolphinite as it seems to have a more fluid consistancy that I expected. I first thought it would be similar to the butyl putty feel to it.

Time to consult the group. Thanks for visiting.