About TeakGuard. Where did it come from?

Teak wood is one of many hard oily tropical wood that are used to build beautiful, strong and long lasting furniture as well as tough, water, bug and fungus resistant decking and trim on a wide range of boats and ships.

For hundreds of years teak has been used for hulls and decks of sailing ships. Because of the nature of the wood and it being saturated with a waxy resin material that bugs and worms don’t like, it was unnecessary to put any kind of finish on the surface to protect it.  It would simply turn gray. Occasional scrubbing would remove any mold accumulation and return the wood to a pleasant gray color.

The decline of major ship building efforts with teak wood left huge numbers of teak trees unneeded and uncut and the owners if these plantations and forests without an income. The obvious choice was to start a new industry that used teak wood. The problem was that teak could not be glued like normal hardwoods and teak is very hard to work with, so new technologies and tools had to be developed to utilize the beautiful and durable wood.  With the advance of modern furniture manufacturing techniques and power tools the teak furniture industry was born for the mass market. There were still problems with glues and finishes but all in all, the production of beautiful, durable, expensive teak furniture forged ahead. The pleasure boat industry also took advantage of teak’s unique properties and many small boats and not so small boats has plenty of teak included in the design. Decks, rub rails, doors, cabinets, you name it were made of teak.

Fast forward to the spring of 1980. Two neighbors in F airfield, Ohio were standing in the back yard looking at a boat with teak trim and decking. It looked awful as it did every spring. The spar varnish was cracked and blistered and peeling and generally looked terrible. The conversation went something like this.

Richard – “You know I just love this boat, but sanding the varnish off ever year and putting new varnish on each year makes loving it very hard.”

John – “Well I’ll bet you that I can come up with a finish that will eliminate your 2 to 3 week ordeal and still make you boat look great.”

Richard – “Yea, Sure, I’ll believe that when I see it.”

John was a chemist and had some knowledge of wood finishes and polymers. With new materials coming to the market every week, he was sure that there had to be a material that could be used as a finish for teak that would no peal off every year.  And, you know what, he was right.

What John found was a water based polymer emulsion that had some very unique properties. Unlike all the finishes used for teak at that time except for tung oil , it was gas permeable. It actually allowed gas and more importantly water vapor to pass through it without producing excessive pressure between the surface of the wood and the polymer finish which is what caused the other “sealing finishes” to fail. Tung oil had a different failing. It readily grew mold.

The addition of some very affective UV reflector additives to the nearly clear polymer finish produced a honey color that made the teak looked very much like it had just been oiled with tung oil. The big difference was the polymer did not support mold growth like tung oil. The UV additives kept the wood from turning gray and retarded the UV oxidization of the polymer.  Eureka, a new and long lasting finish for teak wood had been created except for one small problem. The polymer was an experimental product and it was withdrawn from the market after just 2 years.  John had to start over on the search for an approprate polymer, the result of which produced an even better, stronger, more resilient finish using 2 water based polymers.

Richard being the more business savvy of the two men started marketing the finish to boaters as “TeakGuard” finish for teak. This was before the internet was really cooking and Richard was far from a computer wizard so his marketing dollars went to a variety of boating magazines and the occasional boat show. In 20 years of marketing a nice following developed but not enough to retire on.  Boaters are a difficult bunch and a water based finish for teak was looked upon with considerable skepticism. Richard did not persue the furniture market because he did not consider it to be big enough to bother with.

That of course turned out to be completely wrong. During the 1990′s the use of teak on boats declined because most boat owners did not know about TeakGuard and used the same old sealers or oils to protect their teak. This resulted in the yearly stripping and refinishing that every boater loved to hate. The teak was replaced with textued fiber glass or rubber stuff that looked a little like wood.  Today very very few of the boats built in the United States have any teak at all. This is not true for the rest of the world. Boats build in Austrailia, Europe and Asia often have lots of teak but the boat owners have not changed. Water based polymers finishes are not believed to be strong enough for the harsh whether and sun most boats are expected to endure.

Fast forward again to 2008 with its financial challanges. The small water craft business has tanked, however, the million dollar plus boat industry is still producing plenty of boats many laten with teak and other exotic woods. The teak furniture industry, which has historically produced beautiful but expensive furniture has found it self needing to reduce prices to move it products and to compete with a new and very agressive competitors from China.