Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Gloss to satin?

What counts is how hard a finish gets and some junk like spar varnish will gum. Can't be sanded for a few years and it never lasts that long on my door sill. It is why boats are put in dry dock and re-finished every year. Plain linseed oil never dries and it is used in paints so moisture can go in and out. Boiled linseed oil is not boiled, it has a hardener in it. Tru oil has the best hardeners and gets real hard.
Long ago there was another linseed based finish called Linspeed but it never dried and would gum with steel wool. It went away soon.
Real tung oil is much better.
Oil paints used on a house lets in moisture and if the walls do not have ventilation behind, the paint peels and needs scraped every year. Joe used oil paints on his house and porches. The wood rotted away, shutters rotted and fell apart. We had to jack up the roof and replace post bottoms. He gets less then a year of good looking.
If you want a laugh, he has an old house that the foundation leaks water on the little basement floor to a sump pump. He cut grooves to channel water to the hole. The floor is pea gravel or river stones. The pump quit so I helped him install a new one. The sump is a 5 gallon plastic bucket that was full of stones to bind the impeller of the pump. Life of the new pump is measured in weeks with the Mickey Mouse setup.
Some of the finish posted for stocks is another Mickey Mouse solution. A stock finish should withstand working, rain, snow and every condition you have from heat to cold. Tru Oil meets it all.