>I have some re-caulking to do and have read about different tools to remove the caulk. ...... What is the best way to do the job? There are as many best ways to do the job as there will be respondents to your question :-) I don't pretend that my method is the best, but it's what I do. Assuming the deck seams were done correctly in the first place, which means there is a bond-breaker at the base of the seam, usually a strip of tape the width of the seam, I simply run an Xacto knife along each side of the seam to cut it free of the wood and then use a narrow screwdriver to assist prying the strip of caulk out of the groove in one piece. This is extremely easy since the bottom will not be adhered to the bottom of the groove because of the bond-breaker. If a bond-breaker was not used when the seam sealant was applied the job will be much more difficult because the strip of caulk won't want to come out of the groove even after both sides have been cut. This is where a power tool of some sort might be of benefit. I have to be careful not to let the knife slice into the wood as I'm cutting the sides of the seam but I've found it quite easy to keep the blade going where I want it to. After the main strip of caulk is peeled out, I use a matte knife (aka box-cutter) with its heavier blade to remove any sealant that may still be adhering to the sides of the groove. I hold the knife so the sharp edge of the blade is vertical and at right angles to the edge of the groove and then pull it along the edge like a scraper but without a great deal of pressure. This removes any left-over sealant but does not cut into or damage the wood. The thing I like about this method--- which I learned from the shipwright we hired a number of years ago to re-groove and re-caulk our main deck-- is that there is virtually no risk of having a power tool take off in the wrong direction or swerve or wobble and widen the groove. Last weekend I redid a couple of seams on our flying bridge where the sealant was starting to separate from one side of its groove. These seams ran the entire length of the flying bridge, but fortunately they had been installed with a bond-breaker in the bottom of the groove. I estimate it took me about five minutes to remove the old sealant from each groove. It took far, far longer to clean out each groove and prepare it properly for new sealant. By the way, there is only one teak deck sealant worth using today and that is TDS (Teak Decking Systems) SIS440. It's a one-part sealant, comes in a caulking gun tube, and is the sealant now used by manufacturers like Grand Banks to caulk their deck seams at the factory. ____________________ C. Marin Faure GB36-403 "La Perouse" Bellingham, Washington