RPetry

Searching for an email address, ran across the following Press Release dated 6/5/13. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/6/prweb10790900.htm Last year, they changed the stain names. Ok, getting use to them. This year, they changed to metal buckets. Still like the old plastic. We've applied ~ 120 gals. of Ready Seal so far this spring. Had no idea the stain formulation itself had changed. Looks the same, same viscosity, smells the same, coverage seems identical, and quickly penetrates into wood as usual. Fooled me. If it lasts as long and maintenance is no different, I guess this is a good thing. Who says manufacturers cannot make a good exterior wood stain due to the current 250 grams/liter VOC regulations? Yikes, at < 100, I think Ready Seal may be legal in that exterior woodie hell hole, Southern California!

Patrick, OK, that makes sense. What species of wood? If a softwood, give it a week or so to allow to blend in.

Patrick, This is using Ready Seal? In 13 years of using the stain I have never seen even a hint of lap marks, even on a hardwood such as ipe'. Either the wood was not completely stripped, something was blocking penetration into the wood, or the stain was applied unevenly to the extreme. Deck pads are worthless when using Ready Seal. As I mentioned in a post above, for a 1st time restoration, the wood has to be given a lot of oil. Deck pads hold little stain, aside from the first dip and 6" of application. Much better to use a 6" natural bristle brush on a long, screw in handle, and soak the wood.

Beautiful, well designed and built clear western red cedar deck, about 2 years old. Received a call in late October of 2011, "The stain is peeling off my new deck!" was the message. Well yeah, some brain surgeon applied a lousy water based stain on the cedar two weeks after it was built! So in November, stripped, neutralized, and did a light sanding. Job done for the year, the wood has to weather over the winter prior to staining. Came back in April of 2012, did a light cleaning and stained. Everything is hunky dory. Received an email last month, "Help, the house washer messed up my deck!". Oh boy, this sounds like fun. Come to learn the customer contracted a Pressure Washing Service to clean the exterior of his home. Included in the job was "Do a light cleaning of the deck surface to remove the dirt". Woodies will know where this is headed. The company blasted the snot out of the cedar, with wand marks and some minor gouges, trying to remove the existing stain with high pressure! Jesus Christos! After some effort and customer expense, we were able to whip the wood back into shape. Stain is Ready Seal Light Oak. If anyone likes these horror stories, we're working on one now.

In July, received the following email from my website: Message: Help! I have a 5-year-old cedar deck that needs to be restained. I have the feeling the contractor we hired does not know how to properly handle cedar. He powerwashed to remove the old stain and was unable to get everything off. Now he wants to restain over the parts where the old stain still remains, and everything tells me this is the wrong approach! He also did not use a cleaner/brighter -- just the pressure. I am desperate for help! This is the third contractor we've used over the years to treat our deck, and no one I've contacted in my area follows the procedures you outline on your website. Is there any chance you would come up to XXXXXXX for a job? If not, do you know of anyone in my area who could handle cedar in the correct manner? Thank you so much, XXXXXXX Customer name and location redacted to protect the innocent. Short story. 5 yr. old clear cedar deck. Lord knows what the 1st "contractor" did, but the stain did not last long. 2nd "contractor" applied Sikkens to the horizontal cedar and a Cabot oil to the vertical wood. Lord knows why the 2 different stains. The Cabot's lasted for two years, though dark from linseed eating mildew. The Sikkens started getting bare spots after a year. Not good. Probably due to improper wood preparation or applying the stain to high moisture content wood or both. After all, why use a moisture meter and do the job right when they cost $150 and you just want to get done and paid? Ran up a few weekends ago to look at the mess and provide an estimate. Very sad. The 3rd, current "contractor" did as described in the above email. Blasted the cedar with just water pressure to strip Sikkens! And the Cabot oil! Add insult to injury. Said "contractor" applied 3 different stains (1 some waterbase and 2 some oil based stains, to 2 handrails and ~ 7 cedar floorboards. I guess these were gigantic "samples". And this was over partially removed Sikkens and Cabot stains! Where do these no nothing, foul ball "contractors" come from? The local insane asylum?

Trevor, You are welcome. Canadians are so polite. Those of us in the N.E. US should learn a thing or two from our Northern friends.

John, Buck up! Lord, you're a lot younger than I am. And at least on the exterior side, its only a 7 month season. Gotta' make hay ...! With the weather forecast the next 3 days here in the Northeast, you may have a down day or two due to heavy rain. We will, but we only work on wood. The good/bad part of our business is that you get periodic days off, but then work the weekends to try and catch up! I've scheduled 5 scattered days off this wood season when I'll be out of town for a recreational break. That's enough to stay sane and relatively recharged. Keep in mind that by late January, you'll be chomping at the bit to put in a 6 or 7 day work week!

Trevor, I would reconsider and at least test using a 2% bleach/soap solution. Nothing kills mold and mildew more effectively than bleach. If you constantly rinse the surrounding walls with low pressure water while you are applying and letting the mix dwell a short while, it should work fine. Test on a ceiling spot next to a wall first. Unlike percarbonate, bleach kills quickly, AFAIK, on contact, so little or no dwell time is needed. Surfactants such as Dow's Tergitol NP-9 thicken any chemical mix and provide some "cling". Many PW distributors should carry the product or similar. Use a clear waterbase wood stain, not an oil stain. Mildewcides in oil stains break down over time, and linseed oil, which is used in most oil stains, is a food source for mold and mildew.

Jealous. Catch any summer flounder?

Shane, Now that is one funny line!

Beth, Woodcare = winter vacations

Apc, Certainly sounds like fuel starvation, but I'm no mechanic. I have to admit I have never experienced any problem with any engine using 10% ethanol fuel. Our primary PW is a 12 yr. old Hydrotek with a Vanguard engine. Knock on wood, it has always started right up and has never let us down. Aside from normal maintenance, the only repair was replacing the unloader a few yrs. ago. The AR pump has never required a rebuild. I do add fuel stabilizer and run the engine for about 5 minutes before putting it to bed for the winter.

Rod, I don't think it is "some company". More likely, a whole ton of agricultural interests and associated lobbyists. If you go inland from the East and West Coasts, agriculture is a HUGE percentage of the economy. I'm too lazy to find a chart, but the price of a bushel of corn has risen dramatically over the ethanol years, possibly mirroring the cost of college tuition increases. Much of this is due to gov't policy. Oil became verboten, wind, solar, and silly corn ethanol was the energy future. How's that working out? All of a historical sudden, we find out that there is more natural gas BTU's here in the US than Middle East petroleum reserves. And the Keystone pipeline from Canada is off the table. Meanwhile, millions of poor around the world suffer due to the high price of corn products. The United States production of corn fed a large part of the acute starving and suffering world in my lifetime. Now its down to pay up, as we're eco friendly. Nonsense and shameful.

Patrick, Well, I said it was a long shot! No doubt, something beside RS stain is in or on that cedar. Here are a few pics of a difficult knotty WR cedar job. New owners, some kind of crappy water based junk had been used in the past. A tough strip. After stripping and brightening with citric acid, check out the black marks. Corroding fasteners from a cheap or clueless deck builder. Final pic shows the wood stained with Ready Seal light brown (now called "light oak"). Note the knots, they are darker than the surrounding cedar. This is normal.

Patrick, Granted, it is a long shot. But how old is the cedar deck? Those foul Behr stains were manufactured starting in the early '90's and on the market into the early 2000's. If the current owners were not in possession of the home 12 - 20 years ago, who knows what was applied and when? This debacle lasts forever. WRC knots are always darker when stained with a true oil. And in my opinion, correctly prepped and stained, it looks terrific. That is not your problem. It is the rest of the "darker, mottled" horizontal wood.

Possibly, it could be both! Shane's post jostled my memory. Patrick, Do you know how old the cedar deck is? The reason I ask is that I ran into a similar situation on an old P/T deck many years ago. It was a fairly tough strip, with similar dark areas in, not on, the wood surface, that could not be sanded out. A leaky Shurflo unit with stripper left on the deck overnight actually did clean an "in wood" dark area, but we were not going to apply stripper for 14 hrs. straight to clean up those stains! The owner found a can of the old stain, which was Behr's Natural Seal Plus. This stain, along with 3 other Behr stains, was the subject of at least 2 class action lawsuits, that were settled for at least $162 million. Behr knowingly put ineffective mildewcide into the products, allowing the linseed oil to promote mildew growth in the wood. The majority of the plaintiffs were located in the Pacific Northwest. See: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Big-wood-stain-lawsuit-settled-1099677.php

Patrick, Cedar is by far the most difficult common wood to restore. Most times, not a problem, but difficulties do arise. Just ask any stain manufacturer!

Patrick, Welcome to the fun part of wood restoration. In your original post, the last picture, my description "wet after stripping", it did appear that some old stain remained in or on the cedar. As to your question "is this common?". Short answer is no, but not infrequent. We have run into many similar jobs over the years. There are specialty strippers or boosted additives for sodium hydroxide strippers that can chemically remove the tough stuff. With Western Red Cedar, this is preferable in most cases to spot sanding, especially if it is a hard spot sanding generating significant heat. Try a 2nd light coat of Ready Seal. It may help somewhat.

John, I just turned 60, I would guess that you are in your late 40's or early 50's. Review your life. Look how much so many things have gotten better! Mundane stuff, like auto reliability. When was the last time we had to pull out a jack and change a tire or even get dirty try to keep the thing running? I'm old enough to remember a total of 3 over the air TV stations. Consider the choice most have today with cable. A hard wired telephone call to Ca. from NJ. was something like $3.00/min. in the '60's! Terrorist threats today do not hold a candle to the Cold War. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we were on the verge of nuclear Armageddon. To those too young, in simple terms it means most within 40 miles or so of major American cities are dead within a week or so. And it was a very close call. Mass starvations in China, India, the near and far East. Like in millions of dead. From not having enough food to actually stay alive. More citizens have more opportunities, and the ability to live their own life as they wish in this country than ever in my lifetime. No, it is not "Leave it to Beaver", but who in their right mind would want to live that way, then or now? There is some odd peculiarity for many older people to yearn for "the good old days". IMO that is dementia. If I had a .38 revolver and an iron clad guarantee from a God, I'd pull the trigger in a flash to come back in a 100 years to live my remaining life in the future.

This perceived malaise is like a movie that keeps on repeating slowly, every 40 years or so. Doubt if it is endemic to the American experience. More likely human nature. Its generational claptrap. In the late '60's and '70's, my parents were appalled. Riots in major cities, political assassinations, Vietnam war, protests in the streets, hippies with long hair, free love, and crazy mind blowing drugs. Watergate, oil supply embargo, Jimmy Carter, gas lines, 18% interest rates, Japan eating our lunch in business. The future was bleak, and the US going to hell in a hand basket. History. My grandparents and our country in general went through some tough times in the '30's and through WWII. Great depression, labor strife, riots, strikes, and deadly violence. No jobs, bread lines, farmers foreclosed or abandoning land to beg for work. A real, long term stock market crash. Banks failing, lifetime savings lost. Millions left destitute and relying on charity. Unemployment rates from the mid teens to the mid 20's from 1931 through 1940. Extreme political strife. ~ 420,000 dead Americans in the European and Pacific war theaters. So what happened? This country picked itself up by its collective bootstraps, both times, and made a better life for my parents and my generation. So here we sit in our air conditioned homes, with food on the table, silly smartphones in our hands to connect to the world, and fret that MSMBC/ Fox News, Conservatives/Liberals, and Congress does not agree. The educational system in the country is second rate, and the young today are questionable in character and ability. The country is broke, and our collective economic, cultural, and social systems are going to hell. The future of our children and the U.S. is dim. Nonsense. Our county and most of the world is much improved, astonishingly so, up to today in my lifetime and those of my parents, grandparents, and long gone past generations. That trend is not going to change. It's a lesson of history.

Guy, Reading my post again, I probably did not express my point well. No, I certainly feel no guilt or need to apologize to anyone for history before my birth. That would be inane. As a racial group in the U.S., statistically, I would think there is little debate that "Whites" are born with a "leg up" in this society compared to "Blacks", "Hispanics", and "American Indians". Much of this advantage was expressed so well by Allison, "but we are not starting from an equal playing field. History, socioeconomics, cultural issues all come into play." What I was trying to explore in my own mind and express was to put the shoe on the other foot. How would I react and feel about the Zimmerman case if I had been born a statistically average Black in America?

Patrick, Your last picture, img_3839, does not look right. Was this taken during, or after stripping? Was the cedar floor sanded hard prior to staining? I agree, that is a very blotchy stain result. Something is wrong.

John, Probably the best line and idea published in this thread.

apc_cleaning, Nonsense. Use fresh fuel or additives. I've run 5 track days, one over 94 F. degrees, in a 2005 Lotus SC 4 banger with 93 octane E10 fuel without problem. Stop by at Watkins Glen next month, the fuel works fine and I'll prove it again. Our PW equipment or trucks do not come close to the demands put on a car driven as fast as driver ability possible around a road circuit for 30 minutes or so. Not that I am fast, but I do my best!

Guy, Good post. A short answer, HISTORY. Black citizens were reviled, beaten down, left to rot for much of our nation's past. This does not just disappear in a generation or three. In contemporary time, I have difficulties understanding this. Being White in America, that is normal. I (and assuming you), won the lottery when conceived Caucasian, hopefully middle class, in the U.S. A real "Head Start". I'm old enough to remember the '60's. Put the shoe on the other foot. I would not want to trade. Our forbearer's left this current society with a legacy of difficulty in race relations.