Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What finish should I use..?

Two major types of outdoor fence and deck wood preservatives which of course can be had tinted so as to do double duty as a stain: typically there's the water-based and then there's oil-based. My experience has been that the oil-based preservative-penetrants so much better with much less surface build. If you can still find it, Flood's Penetrol (or something similar) would do be my choice on the cedar and it would preserve the color well. BTW, no matter what the salesman tells you, plan on maintenance re-coats every two/three years. Oil-based penetrants work well in this regard, requiring very little surface prep prior to re-treating, compared to other-type finishes.

Dalys Seafin Teak Oil.

Goes on easy, wipe off in 15 minutes wait 8-24 hrs and do it again, three coats or as many as you want.
No buildup and leaves a nice satin finish.

I played with some finishes on some red cedar and Alaska Yellow Cedar (Cypress) boat benches.

Daly’s spar was better than their ship n shore with sea fin over it. One is a built up surface finish, the other an oil finish that doesn’t build near as much. Th sea fin looks great but needed more touch ups and showed some mold after a year.

I even tried a couple coats of the spar with sea fin teak oil over it. Looked great but the spar is more durable.

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It will still look great for many years if you leave it natural. If you apply a coating it will look like crap the first year you don't feel like doing the maintenance

AK yellow cedar is a cypress, but if you buy cypress lumber from anywhere it will not be AK yellow cedar... Real cypress is very different from yellow cedar.

Good looking crew!

Whatever you choose, it should be expensive, difficult to find, difficult to use and made by Belgian monks, only in odd years, did I say, expensive, that counts a lot.