Companionway Boards

The old boards are ugly, the varnish is coming off and taking the veneer with it. What to do?

I’d purchased about $300 worth of raw teak, with the idea of making doors. But after spending a while with Visio making the design, and thinking about it for a year, I realized I’d be doing a lot of work with little benefit. After all, I’d take the doors off when sailing, and the only time I’d really use them was at anchor or hanging in the slip. The reason I’d want doors rather than boards is to keep the warm in…taking boards in and out just to enter and exit the cabin gets tiresome after the 20th time in an evening.

Instead, I made a Sunbrella cover that serves the dual purpose of covering the companionway teak when I’m not at the boat, and can be used to hold in ‘most’ of the warmth when hanging on the boat while still providing ventilation! It works great, and getting in and out of the cabin is a simple matter of unclipping the cover at the bottom, where the bungee cord that’s attached to the boom will pull the whole thing up and relatively out of the way! It doesn’t cover it “perfectly”, so maybe I’ll sew some extra fabric around the edges. Or maybe not.

But the boards are still ugly, so I went out and bought a half-sheet of marine grade 3/4inch teak veneer plywood. A router is essential to make the joints between the boards. This worked out pretty well.

Notice how thin the actual veneer is. You can’t sand this stuff down, so a scratch in the veneer is something you’ll just have to live with.

The router table is really important for one feature that I really like: VENTS! I decided to top the companionway boards with a 3” wide piece of real Teak. After routing out a joint that will be really strong once it’s epoxied together, I made two 6 inch slots inside the actual joint. The slot on the plywood side is curved so water will drain out, and stained a dark mahogany color.

The wood was then epoxied and clamped into place. Note the cans that I used to apply a little weight on the center of the glue joint. That’s penetrating epoxy, which I’ll use for a sealer coat. With veneer, you’ll never be able to strip thevarnish off and renew the finish from scratch, so the base coat needs to be attached for the life of the boards. Penetrating epoxy is nasty, stinky stuff that needs to be applied with good ventilation, a serious respirator, and gloves. The solvents will kill your liver and central nervous system, which just isn’t worth the buzz. (My liver probably can’t take much more abuse.) However, those same solvents work their way deep into the wood, emulsifying the natural oils and making them part of the glue. If the first coat of varnish is applied when the epoxy is about 75 per cent cured, the epoxy will also bond to the varnish, and you end up with a finish that’s about as secure as it gets.