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This spring, once the snow melted off the deck I built last summer, I noticed something disturbing.  The stain which I painstakingly applied last summer was peeling like a mufo.  I contacted the stain manufacture cabot stains and asked what would be happening and how to fix it.  They sent me a survey, and asked from some tape pulls.  It took me a while to fill in the survey, mainly because it got lost under a bunch of papers on my desk.

Once I found the survey, and started to fill it out, I was even more disturbed when the tape pull pulled off a 6 inch strip of stain.  I send the survey and the samples off to Cabot in the middle of July.  I finally heard back from them mid September after many phone calls and voice mails.  They claimed it wasn’t the fault of their stain, the wood wasn’t prepared correctly even though I followed their directions.  However, they valued my business and decided to give me a bunch of free stain which I have yet to receive.

With the summer running out, I decided to start fix up the deck this weekend.  I spent part of Saturday washing down the deck as per their instructions to remove the old stain.  I was quite surprised when have the stain on the deck peeled off, leaving a hell of a mess.  Sunday, I had to smooth out all the spots to remove any of the dead wood fibers.  Since it was quite a bit, I didn’t relish the thought of doing it by hand, and I didn’t think the finishing sander I have was up for the task.  I ended up renting a large deck sander from Home Depot for the afternoon to clean it up.  There was stain left on the deck where it stuck properly and I was told to just rough it up a bit and I could stain over.

It took a while, but the sander did a pretty good job of smoothing out the spots.  Sunday night, I applied the first coat of stain just before dark, using the left over stain from last year.  Tonight, I didn’t think I had enough to do a second coat, so I picked up another gallon of the SPF-48 stain at a local store.  They said, they had quite a few problems with the stain, and it not one of their recommended ones.  They did say thought that the Cabot Australian Timber Oil was an excellent oil based stain.  Unfortunately at this point, I was stuck with the SPF48 stain that I had already used last year.  At the moment, the deck looks good, and hopefully the stain will last.  If not, I may have to sand the entire thing down again.