Well, it's done!
I've spent in the region of 45 plus hours on it... most of which was prepping and sanding... but it's done!
I found most of the drill bit and sander attachments were useful to an extent, but were never gonna be able to get into all the joints in the way that I needed. For me to truly extend the life of the bench, I needed the new solvent based treatments to get in all the nooks and crannies and give it a proper good coating. So, paint stripper, in this case, off the shelf Nitro Mors... It became apparent quite quickly this wasn't gonna cut it. It barely touched it to be honest. Fortunately I had a friend with a spare tin of the industrial Paramose paint stripper (and I used nearly all 5 litres of it). I might be over stating here, but I reckon I might have given up on this job if it hadn't been for the Paramose. Brilliant stuff, noxious, dangerous, but brilliant. Even with the Paramose, I would say 30 plus hours of the 45 were stripping and sanding. Heavy grit sand paper and wire brushes were the order of the day, and I went through a lot of wire brushes. It felt like an endless task.
It's a big old bench, I reckon it weighs over 35kg, and is somewhat unwieldy. It really wants you to just leave it in situ and work your way around it, but that quickly did my back and knees in. I got some A frames and floorboards and made myself a make shift work bench so I could work on it at head / chest height, flipping it over as I saw fit. Not easy, but so much better than working on it on the ground. It also spent some time on either of it's ends.
There was then a bit of digging out and filling along with using some of the wood hardener. The filler is very pale and doesn't take the new stain as well as the wood, but fortunately it's not on show. I'm sure there are ways of matching the filler, but I never really got into it, something of an oversite on my part.
I used Barrettine Wood Protective and Barrettine Wood preserver, several coats of each, they went on no problem over the freshly sanded wood and also absorbed nicely into the bits that had been treated with the wood hardener, you can't see any differentiation. I went with a dark top coat to hide as many of the blemishes as possible, and it looks great. Interested to see how it weathers too.
It's currently sat in the pouring rain and the water is beading off nicely.
Not as good as pressure treating it I'm sure, and I'll probably have to keep giving it a top coat each summer with the Barrettine, but hopefully it'll last another twenty years of so if I look after it.
Cost wise, without looking at receipts, I would guess at about £200 plus having been spent. Could have been worse, most of that was the paint stripper and new Barrettine products, of which I still have some left over for future coats and other projects.
A big thank you for all your help and knowledge. Couldn't have done it without you!
I need a lie down now.
