Okay. So this looks pretty simple, right? You simply cut the old, broken piece of teak out (see the ol' clunker shown above as well as the pix in the previous post: Uh-Oh!) and then scarf in a replacement piece, secure it to the underlying metal supports with bolts, countersink the heads of the bolts in the fresh teak, then plug the countersinks with teak bungs and wait for the weather to turn everything silver gray and uniform.
Wrong!
The preceding bunch of verbiage would make a lot of sense if it was actually possible to put a bit of a bend into a 1 1/2-inch X 3/4-inch teak plank that happens to be only about five foot long. But since such a piece of plank is so short as to be virtually unbendable, you have to go another route, employing an old-time wooden boatbuilding technique called spiling to accomplish a fix.
How does spiling work? Hmmmmmm, there are various ways of doing it, but let me try for a brief explanation of how the technique was used to cut the piece of teak shown above to perfectly replicate the original plank, bend and all. I'm going to toss in a crude drawing (I did it myself) that may help:
The first thing you do is fit a piece of scrap board (pine works well) underneath the missing section of plank (with both ends cut diagonally with a coping saw to prepare for a couple of scarf joints) and secure it as shown in the drawing with temporary clamps. Make sure the piece of scrap pine or whatever is reasonably flat, without a trace of warp.
The next step is the critical one. Use a woodworking compass (something like navigational dividers, but with a pencil on one end) to replicate the curve of one of the inner planks on the scrap planking, arcing across from one diagonal cut to the other. The key here is to make sure you keep the compass at right angles to the inner plank as you go along, thus drawing a curved line on the scrap that connects the two diagonal cuts and accurately parallels the inner plank you've chosen to work with.
The penultimate step entails marking the ends of the replacement piece you've drawn. Once you've done that, you remove the clamps and either transfer your scrap drawing to an appropriate slab of teak and cut out the finished piece or else cut the drawing from the scrap with a band or reciprocating saw and use what results as a template to cut the final version.
In either case, the job's remainder is comparatively straightforward. After doing a dry fit to make sure all is well, you simply secure the scarf joints at the ends of the teak replacement piece with epoxy, and bolt and bung the thing to the supports underneath.
About the only thing I've got left to do on this whole deal is mix some fine teak saw dust with epoxy and use it to fill and fair the older planks around the repair--I've decided to remove both brackets for my Weaver davits to obviate any problems in the future.