plainpainter

Jim - my experience with Mahogany and how oil it accepts is bi-modal. Absolutely some of the Mahogany decks I do take in more oil than pressure treated - but the other group of Mahogany takes in a lot less oil than pressure treated.

Here is a photo from my front porch, stained it with this product - 4 months later it more than a one coat application when I stained it a second time last September. And here she is now, the nice spot is where I kicked aside the placemat. So let's hear it.....GUESS THAT STAIN!!!!!!

pressure treated doesn't need annual maintenance. My two year warrantee is a maintenance contract for pressure treated - but I guess I will have to shorten it for Mahogany. I don't have as much experience with hardwoods as other members - but I haven't found a product that doesn't last more than a year on Mahogany, unless it's a semisolid.

This is a deck I am attempting to restore, it is straight grained fir that was installed just two years ago and immediately finished off with Sikkens SRD. Now my initial reaction was that Sikkens is now junk - but I have been compiling a bunch of memories of my work in the past with several fir decks dating back to '06 all the way to a restoration I just completed and my opinion now is that Fir is just junk wood - at least for staining purposes in an outdoor environment. It was the only wood folks use to use for their covered front porches - before pressure treated existed, but was only ever painted typically with some form of oil floor paint. I will be abandoning oil entirely for this last Fir project and I am going with DEFY Extreme epoxy/nano-particles based stain. Will follow up with pictures as I continue this project.

Here are some photos after being stripped and neutralized - notice some spots of that Cabot's clear still left on the deck after I ignited a nuclear bomb on it, that remainder was hard as glass!

Jim - you will laugh when I tell you how I stripped this deck. I had HD-80 mixed full strenght in a pump-up. But I had my winterized trailer with 15 gallons of anti-freeze sitting in the float tank - I took it out of winterization by emptying it on this deck, then following with HD-80, and then emptied the remainder on top of that!!!! LOL - and it still didn't get everything off! The first coat was some Cabot's clear - it was hard as glass, those photos of the stripped deck are to follow. Oh yeah - when I was stripping off this so-called 'stain' it had built up so much, I had to get a landscaping broom to push off the accumulated pile of this stain off the deck! Seems to be more and more of this kind of non-sense as time goes on.

Here are the before pics of the Fir deck I just completed - 2 layers of some nasty film former, I think SPF followed by ATO post '05 version. It was a real nasty strip.

Jim - I am going to post photos of a deck fir deck I just finished - guy had two coats of the worst kind of film former you've ever seen over a 7 year period. There was only so much I could do - I heavily modified A.C. with extra Mildewcides and Jap drier - I also reduced it 25% with spirits, and even then it had a hard time sucking up the stain.

I just restored another fir deck with A.C. - and it ain't pretty, not A.C.'s fault. I will post those pics in this thread as well to show the progression - and warn other restorers not to get involved with Fir decks. It's a beautiful deck - but there is something really screwed up with the wood.

Charlie, you've been lucky then. Because I know I can strip A.C. with my house wash. Maybe your guys didn't spend anytime rinsing off the deck, in which case perhaps all the loose pigment stayed in place - which is lucky. Or the homeowners just haven't been very discerning. But it would definitely be prudent of you to do some testing and make sure everything stays in place to your satisfaction. I routinely wash houses with adjacent decking, where I can literally scrub F-10 into the surface with dwell into a 2 yr. old finish - and nothing happens to the finish.

That's because anything north of half strength house wash, and your A.C. deck will be stripped. God forbid I ever come across a house wash with an adjacent A.C. deck that I unsuspectingly wash. Now that would ruin my day!

Man - I was $hitting bricks that those tornados would make it to eastern Mass - I feel so badly for you guys. They're saying that the springfield tornado was an EF3 - I don't believe it, only EF-4 and above obliterates houses - and that was total carnage I saw on the news.

It's been 6 years since the EPA change, and to date I don't think any manufacturer has stepped to the plate in making a oil base stain that actually works within the confines of 250g/l voc's. I don't really care anymore - I am going waterborne - too many damn headaches lately. There are always promises, but nothing so far that delivers.

I use it all the time, great product.

I was just asked to look at a deck for a previous customer - previously the deck was coated with latex solid stain on fir - two years ago, they had it re-skinned with Fir and then coated with Sikkens, SRD I assume. Now the thing looks like the biggest piece of garbage I have ever seen. The problem is that it mirrors exactly my experience with my own Fir projects in the past. Is sikkens just total crap - or is there something kind of F'd up with Fir? I've never seen a Fir deck look good - except one that had a roof and was painted with high gloss oil porch and floor paint. Is DEFY epoxy style stain a good candidate with Fir wood? I am nervous about using A/C as I am having mildew problems with pressure treated. Just wondering if anyone else has had any experience with Fir decking and noticed similar things. I have a friend with an old picnic table with the table top made from fir, semi-solid stain, probably has sat outdoors for the past 14+ years and still looks good. This is the only time I have ever seen outdoor stained fir look decent.

Jon, I know where you are coming from. I've made good money re-doing peeling painted decks with paint again. We all have to review our services from time to time. Sometimes guys make something into a high priesthood, like deck care.

If I had a nickel for all the bull$hit products that have come and gone over the years while a member of these boards - I'd be rich! Kevin, dont' take this personally, I speak for many when I say we've been swindled many times over by many manufacturers over the years. At this point, I'd wait 10 years vetting a new product before I changed. Heck, I am not even sold on some oil based products touted on these boards - I am having incredible mildew problems. Just wait until you have to strip a double application of SPF - then tell me how sold you are on acrylate/acrylic products. Not to mention if you have a product last 7 years, then you have effectively killed off your maintenance business. That's why I got out of house painting, customers go 7+ years without needing your business and your cash flow just sucks. Products also have to be friendly to our bottom line as well, or we go out of business. You can never go wrong putting oils into wood.

Other than the deck I posted about the befores and 16 month afters - I usually end up sanding my decks down. I like it better that way - perhaps it's a better job - and perhaps folks in New England neglect their decks much much more than the rest of the nation - and we have really harsh elements here. Anyways - I got to thinking - if I put on an alkaline stripper followed by an acid bath - then sand. Then potentially aren't I sanding off the top layer of 'conditioned' wood? I mean - if you sand wood enough it becomes 'clean' but wood has 'stuff' in it that may or may not interact with stains. And a brightener seems a good way of sequestering that stuff out of the top layer. So what I want to know - has anyone experimented with sanding after the stripping stage but before the acid/brightening stage? And did you notice any different results? The more I think about it - it introduces more days on the job and less profitability - but It seemed to me that it may be a superior job - who knows?

Just doing a quick poll to see who has a copy of the yellow pages laying around their home?

AAARRRRGGGGGG!!!!!! Holy mother of God - note to self, Sherwin Williams 'Oil' based decking stain and Cabot's SPF are going to be charged at a much higher premium next year!!!! That SPF crap is brutal to strip!!! And after stripping it - I am convinced that Sherwin's oil based deckscapes must have acrylic in it as well. With a pump up sprayer I mixed up two gallons of F-18 mixed 12oz/gallon - pretty hot mix, right? Wrong - after 3 sequential applications over an hour and half on a very moist overcast day yesterday - didn't even touch it! Thankfully I ordered a 5'er of butyl from the chemistry store a month ago and had it on hand with some HD-80. Mixed HD-80 at full strength and amended it with butyl and extra NP-9 surfactant. Applied it once - started seeing results after 20 minutes and then re-applied a second time - and that's when it really started to lift. Still the stain was never truly emulsified - it just lifted off the wood and was a goobery mess as I was rinsing it off. Homeowner had tried to strip and brighten themselves with the store bought stripper and couldn't get it off. 5 separate applications of stripper - and the most soapy mess of a rinse off that would just never completely rinse - the applications of F-18 that went directly into the wood I think is to blame? What an F'ing nightmare - but at least it's off. You aren't a true deck restoration specialist until you have tackled SPF. That stain is a nightmare! It is some really tough stuff! But the way it fails - you can't maintain it at all. If they could find a way for this stuff to fail 'evenly' - this would be a great stain

From my experience after doing several oxidation removal projects - I think once you perform a restoration, the surface is much much smoother and that smoothness actually deters regrowth for mildew. This is based upon several homes I did, one being huge oak trees completely covering the north side of a home. Usually there would be strong mildew and algae growth within a year's time - as the 'north' side doesn't need any close proximity of trees to have violent regrowth. But add in a grove of trees completely surrounding the home on the North side with braches resting/covering the roof as well - and you have a disaster of mildew regrowth. This one home I observed had very negligible regrowth even after 4 years time. So I suspect the relatively slippery surface of vinyl after all oxidation has removed deters atmospheric pollutants from sticking to it which is first step of mildew regrowth. I washed a friends truck completely that had mildew growth on 3 months later - it had a very porous oxidized paint surface. And lastly how many times have you heard homeowners say for the first 12 or so years the home never had mildew growth? I suspect the mildew starts to appear after appreciable oxidation buildup, which is probably the amount of time customers say before they started seeing the stuff. So let me ask you this, if oxidation 'grabs' onto atmospheric pollutants faster which promotes mildew growth - why would you promote a service that will inevitably greatly reduce repeat work? At the very least - if a house will go 4X longer before noticeable regrowth, you should charge 4X as much.

This stuff is really pissing me off!!!!! This is the stuff that caused me to strip this front deck a month ago. I couldn't get it off once it set in last time - it grew right into the finish. As you can see, I can wipe it off with my fingertips at this point - I've never heard of being able to do that with mildew? YouTube - 013.mp4 And it appears now the deck is drying off that once again some of the finish got wacked right off again. I could see plumes of oil as I was brushing it.

As well - I am starting to think that A.C. is perhaps a perfect stain for a more arid/dry climate. I've noticed that on this latest recoat, 10 months after the initial staining - that even though the pigment was wiped off the surface, it still had oils in the wood. This sounds like a good thing, but what I noticed that even just one application of this maintenance coat just didn't cure like the original. It still had oily plumes in the standing rain water one month after application. And since this has been the driest summer on the books with burnt out lawns everywhere - it ain't a due to a lack of dry hot summer heat. And I think this sort of lack of curing may be an attractant for spores to stick to more easily.

The finish may not be need to be stripped, but any effort to clean the stuff off strips off the finish. This 'mildew' was only on for like 2-3 days when the rains started. Last time I let it sit for a month before attempting to take it off - and it didn't come off like normal mildew does. I had to use my typical house wash solution before it gets siphoned directly from the 5'er and brush it on. That wiped off the finish completely. And the 'mildew' is not to be seen on any adjacent latex painted surface. Whatever this stuff is - it ain't normal mildew. I have always been able to take off most mildew from a stained deck with as little as two cups of household bleach per gallon with a few squirts of 'soap'. This stuff needs a full blown exorcism with 2-stepping which winds up removing the entire finish. I was lucky to catch it early this time around - but I can see the finish has been dulled from even the weak bleach solution I used yesterday.

I stained this Mahogany Deck last a week ago tuesday after fully restoring it. But there was an enclosed part to this deck where the finish was still like brand new. I am not sure what it was, customer said it was sikkens - it was clear and kind of shiny. But all the walls were tongue and groove fir that was in perfect condition - so stripping this area would have lead to a disaster. So I rinsed all the walls down and floor and sprayed f-18 at 12 ozs/gallon with a 30-40 second dwell and rinsed the whole area down real fast and neutralized. This took off the sheen. Then when I came back to sand the deck - I used a scotchbrite pad on the floor sander and further buffed out the entire floor. Now the floor was completely etched. When I stained - the outdoor portions got two coats like usual, but I only lambswooled one very light coat and stretched it over the boards. But several days later I get complaints about it not being dry, and this is the photo I took. What I did last Friday to try and correct this issue is I brought my Fan down, my infra red space heater. And while that was going - I was also working in the stain with several of those auto style paper towels, I went over the whole floor and kept buffing, moving the infrared heater around - and finally after three hours I got it to the point where the 'wet' boards were nice and uniformly matte in appearance. But I just got more complaints again last night - and this is really pissing me off. The stain that has dribbled down the side of the can is dry, the brush I forgot to put in thinner is crusted hard - why the hell is this floor giving me issues? I know it's completely shaded and it's been humid as heck - but the air has turned drier in the last couple of days and there is air circulation. What can I do at this point? Stripping is out of the question. Can I buff it again - but this time with mineral spirits - or turps? Or something with more zing, like VM&P naptha. Can I buff Japan drier into the surface? We're not talking a lot of stain applied here, just basically took 3 dunks with the lambswool applicator into the tray to cover this whole floor. Will this stain every dry by it's own, eventually?