Stain & Seal Experts at Fence Training School 2019 | Fence Armor

I guess about five years ago I started staining so this is this is not something I've done forever it's something I integrated into from building and selling fences, residential commercial and now here I am and this is kind of impromptu so I just want to show you this is a truck this is one of the trucks that we use in Nashville we stain out of it everyday we don't have a ton of equipment you don't have to spend a million bucks we got a little sprayer there that's about a $800 sprayer a couple buckets of stain and the rest is little stuff but whose stained fences before anybody, a fence or a deck who never wants to do it again? Stain is the main reason this is easier to clean up it's faster it's there's the maintenance is easier there's no coating with the oil base with these particular types of oil based stains there's no film you don't have to worry about it peeling up or chipping off later so you can stain that fence right there you can walk up and stain it ideally we've cleaned it first but that fence you can walk up and stain it a year or two years three years later whatever maintenance program you want to put your customers on you can come back and stain it again and you don't have to prep it you just go right back over it so that makes sense who's got a question to get me started here no questions all right so what we'll do we'll go ahead and stain this fence panel ideally like I said we would clean it first maybe a day two or three days before but we're gonna go ahead and stain it and I didn't set everything up so you can see kind of we're just gonna move nice and slow and get it done and we'll let you guys stain this fence because I'm I'm lazy I don't like staining. Go ahead. A lot of times you buy stain, it says after you spray it you've got a back brush it? You guys don’t have time for that do you? No you'll see that in just a few minutes we flood coat we flood it on you can write your name in the fence whatever you want and it's gonna all self level out that's what makes it fast so many fence guys are worried I don't want to back brush I don't want to worry about overspray and you'll see we might get them on the

(02:13) truck we might if we had a road I thought there was gonna be a concrete road here right from the fence we wet it down with a water hose oil and water don't mix so we can wet everything down you see we keep a hose wet it down and once you stain in the job just rinse it right away you know brick works the same way I've got some videos I can show you guys where we get it on vinyl siding and get it on bricks we wipe it off rinse it off so I don't want you to feel like it's you can be a knucklehead with it but you can definitely you can you can not worry so much about it so here most people are gonna they're cleaning is a big deep rabbit hole we can go down but for that fence the most practical and cheapest way to do it is to use a little shear flow pump and spray up a bleach solution on it and that will kill any mold or mildew it'll it'll turn the fence a nice white color and if you're gonna go over it with a nice brown or red it'll give you a real nice clean slate when you get into decking we go down a big long rabbit hole you know we can do a lot of different things there but keep it simple ideally we would have bleached said fence about two or three days ago in the summertime now we're back on staining day and we've got an airless sprayer here that's a commercial grade airless and it's about eight hundred bucks if you buy one at retail and that's a workhorse you know some companies sell these big huge trailers and stuff and we bought a couple of them but they break down a lot and we just we don't use them anymore we use these little airless, so so let's get started. I need a couple guys to help me mask this brick retaining wall over here I've already got it started if I can do that real quick this this is easier than breaking rock, spray right over you're going to spray right over you’re gonna sell staining to your customer and they want a nice bright cedar color and they've got an old grey fence you just gotta be mindful that the background is gonna have an effect on the finished product so so for this fence I picked a dark color I hope everybody's all right with that for the for the golf course just a dark color and it'll just be more of a placeholder just to see what we're doing all right stain something that's freshly installed I tell most people if you're asking the question two times right now and the reason is it may be better to let this fence age for six months or a year or two the current condition problem is it'll never look as good as it did when it was new so if we can catch it when it's brand new it's gonna look better in most staining contractors or a couple weeks out so if you build the fence today show your customers time to go ahead and let's get you on the schedule bill them for the fence you come back a week later two weeks later and in go ahead stained twenty-five bucks this is a moisture meter and in Florida Georgia you don't get as low a moisture content as we get back home and Nashville we like to get twelve or thirteen percent here we're probably going to be lucky to get fifteen at 17 percent seventeen point nine you just poke and right around 17% it's humid here there's moisture in the air there's fog it's raining it's not ideal but this stains still going to work just fine it's got dummy lights on it so I even I can use it properly these stains are oil-based even water-based stains when you go to Home Depot they put it in the shaker for five minutes so you just want to make sure that when you open this up that it is all mixed up. It'd be ideal if you had a bucket opener. So that stain probably looks different than what most of you are used to, nice and thick and you want to vortex. There you go that stains mixed up and ready to go. That's a brand new sprayer it probably won't work what you want it to what do you want to bet. Yeah it's a brand new. You just drop your your hose in (let's see). It doesn't have anything in the line so that may be why (low talking). Here we go, nothing blew up. So that's the first first time we've ever used this pump it's brand new. Normally your line is going to stay full and believe it or not how often do you think we clean these airless sprayers? Every time? Never. Never clean them. Ever. With oil based stain they don't dry, it's a non drying stain and so it stays dry and some guys probably do use a mineral spirits or something to clean it out. Yeah, the only time we will clean our pumps is if we use a water-based product because water-based products is you would think that oil is harder to clean up than water-based but it is really difficult to clean up or you can just wipe it right off. We could spray this side of the truck wipe it off and nobody would ever know. You say it doesn't dry, but does it dry on the fence? It will, it will, it's a non drying oil so it's a paraffin oil base and that is a non drying oil but it's soaks into the wood and in what what's left on top is your colors, your pigments, your sealers and things and they are, I'm not a chemist but if the wood grain is a is a porous surface kind of like your fingers the sealers just come right in there and the colors and it all just makes a nice flat surface but there's no film nothing to peel off and you'll see what I'm talking about once this dry and we'll go from there but tips on these things and I don't know how deep we'll go and I can answer any question you've got but we like this tips called a number 521, I'll put it there for the camera 521 that's what we like to use but you can use so many different ones and some of the things that make our job easier for these extensions is these swivel heads. So we can turn this head any way we want it, spray anywhere, up high down low, main part you got your bottom runner you can turn your tip up get that bottom runner anything you want to do and that's about it. Does that line come with the sprayer? The hose? The line that you are holding. The gun and the guard come, and I think, I don't know what these are, thirty or forty bucks to get one of those, the swivel I get one of those too you know. You probably got a extra hundred bucks in the setup here but then it's gonna make you so much faster, gonna make you a lot faster. How long like for your what's your average privacy fence how many feet wherever you guys are from? How long would your average one? Two three hundred. Two, three hundred feet. What about what about you? Privacy fence. Yeah well we put up about five hundred. Okay, your two hundred foot job, a good crew can get in and out in about an hour and a half yeah and with the sprayer and on five hundred feet maybe three hours you know it just depends you know and sometimes there’s swimming pools just slows things down but yeah like this fence if if I wanted to I could I could have sprayed both sides of that fence and been gone maybe 20 minutes 15 20 minutes. I'd spend more time rolling up hoses and stuff than anything else so you can be pretty quick with it and know what way the winds going. May be best to start on the other end and work our way back. Is it a one coat deal? Or you going back? It is a flood coat. So what that means, think of a sponge you know a sponge, it's hard and dry and then you drip it in the water and it'll only get so soft and takes so much once you get that saturation point that's when you stop and customers might say hey you didn't put enough on and put some more and you it's it's saturated it's not going to do any more to now or later. Will it get to the point where it will start to actually run? Yeah, we want it to run. Okay, yep. Yeah, this is gonna blow your mind if you've always done water coatings because it's it's nothing it's not like painting a car so, so let's get started. I didn't have my tip on tight enough. but I guess we won't do the backside, I don't think we can get back there anyways. All right so what I like to do, there's a thousand ways to skin a cat I like to get the top first and a lot of times I would start on this far end but I won't so you guys can do it but I would start on the far end while I was pulling my hose out so I would take my tip, turn it down and just walk and get the whole top. I've got my end grain done, doesn't look like much but it is. I am just going to start spraying. Alright, now the hard work is over. There is a lot of over spray you are going to see with this. It is atomized so finely that you are going to get less visible over spray on the house. When you use this flood coat versus like a low-pressure DC pump or a pump up sprayer. The bump up sprayers and the low pressure they put really big particles, they're splashing and where this is so finely atomized it's just a lot easier to clean up but you are going to see the fog and but once you get a couple jobs under your belt you'll get some confidence. Simple as that. You can do whatever you want, it is not going to affect the finished product. So, who wants to give it a shot? Come on! I tried and I don't know if you notice, but I like to hit between the boards, on the first pass. That's about it. You see how it's running? That's what you want. That's it and you'll get, as you as you do it you'll get better obviously but that staining job when it's done you're not going to be able to tell any difference between mine and yours. Did you get that on camera? Those things happen and that's the main reason you don't smell our stain, do you guys smell all those solvents in the stain and all the chemicals? Smell that? Exactly, I used to go home every day looking like this and smelling just terrible. I would get in the shower, take a bath and it would run down the drain and all those oil based stains have carcinogens in them, they're made with solvents and a lot of really deadly stuff and I decided to make a change and that's why we made our stain without solvents so it's solvent free but it still works.

A lot of people say low BOC all that means it's junk, well it just doesn't. That's not true. So things happen and you just gotta run with the punches. I just didn't have my tip tight enough, cause I am a salesman, you fence guys always say we salesman don't know what's going on. Prime example, been in the truck too long, but there we go. That's it. Do the top like that. Who's brave enough to try it now that they've seen it blow up? *laughs* You going to try to stain some? Yeah, I am going to give it a try. *laughing and jokes* Pull the trigger, Stop, let go. When you get to the top let go. Hit it again. Then stop at the bottom. Again. Just like that, you'll figure it out. With a flood coat you can be tempted to go nice and fast, just slow down and go nice and easy. When I'm going back to inspect a job or something when we're done I'm going to look for a few things, I'm probably gonna squat down so I can see the bottom of these posts. We didn't get those, maybe a few thin spots maybe right there we'll hit it. That's it, it is pretty much done. If somebody wants to finish the back here, we will start wiping the gate handles down.You feel like doing it? How much coverage you get out of a 5 gallon bucket? About 10 foot a gallon. That's what makes this type of system work and really profitable because you can get in you can flood it on and you can walk away from it and you're not worrying about peeling, chipping and you're not worried about runs and lap marks and things. You see a few runs, those will all be gone in just few minutes. And it cracks? You don't have to do from both sides, it'll fill in? If you notice when I tried to hit between the cracks first to get that and when you spray both sides you double it. when you spray both sides you double it. It's really not much of an issue. I know you guys, some of you owners are sitting there going, looking at this over spray going man what's what's going on with that. Over spray is an issue if it gets on a car you can wash it off, as you get better, as you as you figure out how to do it you're gonna learn how to manage the over spray so when I get done I'm gonna walk over there if we got it on somebody's car I'll wash it off and you know obviously this is just for demonstration but the wind looks like it's blowing in a good direction for us so anything on the grass you're gonna see a little stain on the grass for a couple of days once they mow the grass it's no big deal our stains are biodegradable so you can use it around ponds or children's backyards and stuff and you're not gonna have an issue. We make deck stains too. Whole other class but but this right here is a really good way to add money to your bottom line. In Nashville in 2008 you could, 2007 you could make about 3,500 bucks on a 200-foot privacy fence in 2008 you can make about 300 bucks on that same fence. Everybody came out of the woodwork building fences and so this enabled us to separate ourselves, it enabled us to not have as many call backs because this this fence isn't going to warp and twist if it's new and we stain it and so it's just a great way to just give something more to your customers and add more money in you know? Is it playground safe? Yes! What happens to the car that gets sprayed and you don't know it and doesn't get washed immediately? With some stains that's a big problem, with our stain we've got a pump up sprayer over there with de greaser in it. Soap and water will take this off. The solvents are what makes it bite into plastics, not into wood but plastics; car finishes, vinyl siding, things like that, anything painted. The solvent in the stain is what really makes it bite in there and that's what it's designed to do when we remove the solvent we found that our cleanup was a lot easier, hundred times more easy and so when we're done with a job and tacking off the truck if you want let me see something. Just so we do a perfect job, here's where that swivel tip comes in, where those posts are. You missed one? I missed one? Salesman *laughs* That's it. Now we just open the gate up and start wiping the hinges down. And it's gonna be safe as soon as you leave once you wipe this hinge down for little Timmy to come out here and open the gate up and let the dog out or whatever.

What if you get it in your eye? In your eye? Don't get it in your eye! *laughs* Now does it stick to galvanized steel posts, you know this fence has steel posts in it. *Overlapping discussion* Almost every gate frame in middle Tennessee is metal and we spray right over them, just like you saw these hinges. We will spray right over it, will wipe it off box of rags. But if it's a galvanized post or a galvanized frame what happens? Nothing. Does it stick? Well you noticed how I got it all over this? Just wipe it off, it will not stick. I guess if you left it on for a month you know if you never cleaned it you might see some residue. I mean there's solids in this stain and the pigments and stuff but no it won't stick to metal. Anything non-porous it won't stick to. We're 90 percent treated, is it you who asked? Yeah we are 90 percent treated pine in Nashville but these stains work on anything and and you see the runs they're slowly going away and a few minutes the finished product will look like this area right here something like that it's gonna have that nice matte it's gonna look just like the fences just change colors and that's it. I mean you could come back the next day if you missed a spot you're not gonna have interfering lap marks or anything so so it's a pretty simple system we didn't make the whole backyard sink for six months like some of these solvent based stains do and we made on this fence right here I don't know what you would charge to build it but you would charge a premium to come out and build this fence you might double your price to do the stain and you can see we stained it a whole lot faster than we could have built it so. We didn't charge them nothing *laughs* That's not good for business though is it? That's it. There is one metal post on the end that is not covered. Would you just leave it after you spray it, I want to see what it looks like next year? Yeah I can spray it, you want me to spray it? Yeah but and then don't wipe it off. Is there one here? See if I can reach in through. When you spray your gates just a side note you guys probably know, it's good to open them up and catch in there just so it looks good but here's the cool thing about an airless sprayer it'll it'll shoot a long way if you turn the tip around. So I did I put a spot on it so you can see is that alright? I want to see if it is the same color as the fence. Does he? He wants to paint the post to see if it sticks or not by next year. Let's do it! On the galvanized post. It is just going to look kind of brown. You want 50% if it works? *laughs* Here you go, you got a brown post back there. That's it guys! I am new to training, so if I left something out just make sure and ask but this is a whole lot of fun, it's it's hard work because it's hot, it's hard work you know because you got to keep your feet moving but it's it's not hard like digging post holes. A lot of people don't know what hard work is but you guys do and staining is a lot easier so there you go. Who's gonna be the next stain crew? Anybody ready? You said it is better on wood fences? Yeah. You can put it on new or old fences. For instance this fence here has opportunity to clean it so you could come in maybe 15 minutes clean it charge $2 to $3 a foot on a big fence and then come stain it $6, $7 bucks a foot depending on where you're located and your material costs probably be somewhere around two dollars and fifty cents a foot of materials in Nashville we pay about sixty cents a linear foot for a crew to go stain the fence so 150 feet they're gonna pay you know they're not gonna pay sixty cents isn't right it's 150 foot fence cost me ninety dollars labor to have a crew go out staining and we don't work subs we work employees but we pay them like subs, keeps your feet moving fast. Okay guys, well this is the Stain & Seal, we put it on this fence and the fence was really dirty and everything, they were able to spray it just spray it on and it rained like crazy last night it's still on it looks beautiful as you can see. It only sticks on wood and no metal as you can see it wipes off it's the best thing.