On Mon, 30 May 2011 10:47:48 -0400, "dadiOH"
wrote:

mm wrote:
Non-newsgroup-readers, my friends, should start HERE, below:

On Sun, 29 May 2011 22:39:22 -0400, mm
wrote:

On Sun, 29 May 2011 14:32:20 -0700 (PDT), zek
wrote:

On May 29, 2:19 pm, TN wrote:
Our front door has an oak front stoop that I have tried every
possible wood stain and polyurethane sealer on the market. No
matter what I use it starts cracking very spring and I have to
sand it down and do it all over again.

Does anyone have a product that can stain and seal oak so this is
more durable?

Thanks!

Polyurethane cracks over wood on exposure. Dejavu
Look for the keyword SPAR varnish.

Greg

How DID polyurethane become so doggone popular? I used it myself in
on my dining room parquet floor and it only lasted a few years in the
heavily traveled parts. At the time, I thought I should have used
varnish of some sort.

Which btw, is what everyone used before polyurethane was invented, and
which looked nice.

For the record, the places where the polyurethane was worn off because
of foot traffic could be recoated without doing the whole room, and
there was no evidence of where the boundary was.

OTOH, the instructions said to wait so long and then rough up the
first coat with steel wool, so the second coat would stick. I waited
the prescribed time and used a floor buffer with a 20" steel wool pad,
and little pieces of the steel wool got stuck in the still soft first
coat.

Too late now but every brand of poly I've used says to sand *IF* more than
"X" time has passed. I don't like to sand so I apply subsequent coats as
soon as the previous is reasonably dry; in the case of floors, "reasonably"
is 2-4 hours depending on ambient temperature and humidity... as soon as I
can walk on it and not stick.

This would have been 1973. Maybe they sometimes had bad directions
back then??? I read the directions several times, including again
after I was unhappy. I still might have misread them, but I don't
think so.

This is like a couple other things that happened long ago. After 40
years I no longer have a direct recollection of all that happened. Now
I tend to remember what my memory of it was, and it's too late to get
past that level back to the original memory.