Scraping & Sanding

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I finished the little bit that was left on the front porch today, the painting there is finally done.
 
When I built a shed here several years ago, I used some windows from the old farm house. I built casings for them all, scraped primed and painted with quality oil paints, installed everything, and then watched the paint job promptly fail in just a few months. I wondered what I did wrong. 180 year old windows, stored dry for many years. The old timers could preserve wood but I could not. What secrets did they take with them. What does it take to create a 20yr paint job. Or for that matter 180yr paint job, because some of the original paint was intact. I was determined to find out.
My conclusion was a form of pretreatment to seal the wood prior to paint. Maritime and historic home restorers use it. Penetrol was mentioned, and has been around for as long as the old windows had been, and is still available. It's linseed oil and alkyde resins along with added driers. Some guys make up their own recipes. I went with the off the shelf stuff. My previous attempts pealed off without an issue, regardless of whether it had been bare wood, painted, repaired with epoxy, etc. Second attemp, pretreat with penetrol, prime while just becoming tacky, finish paint. That was a decade ago. They are in perfect condition with no signs of paint failure.
I got a lot out of the following discussion:
http://historichomeworks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1596
 
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