Four legs exposed to the damp concrete.

You can get galvanised 'feet' that can be hammered into the bottom of posts so that they are not in permanent contact with the ground. It is this contact that results in accelerated wet rot.

If you cannot find anthing suitable, try and find some large galvanized fencing staples and bash one into each leg leaving about a quarter of an inch proud. Soak the bottom of the legs with solvent cuprinol and allow to dry (trickky at this time of year), then ideally treat with end-grain sealer, preferably solvent-based, if you can find anyone who sells it. Most now seem to be water- based.

Get four suitably sized maybe stainless steel containers, 'tins', to stand the legs in. Fill with candle wax and heat. -- Cheers Clive

Are the legs standing on concrete?

Bill

Or fill the tins with wood preservative and allow to stand for several days to let it soak in. If you don't have tins, use large yoghurt pots.

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Chris Hogg snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net writes

I do this with my wooden garden seats, using the larger size pickled beetroot jars (minus the vinegar and beetroot, of course!).

Yes...

It will be standing on a concrete slab.

alo has brought this to us :

Drill an hole vertically up from the bottom of the leg and fit a brass or stainless steel bolt, so the head of the bolt raises it off the concrete.

Fibre glass is not a liquid. If you mean fibre glass resin, then yes,.

Or do what I did the the rotten bottom 4" of my garage door frames. Replace with car body filler!

For exterior applications, the legs should be PTL (pressure treated lumber).

You make a cut to one end to set the length of the item. Place that end against the surface you're holding up.

============================ Top sheet | | | | <== cut end | | | | | | | | +--+ +--+ <== this end, leave intact from factory Do not cut this end!

The uncut end of the PTL can be placed against the concrete slab.

PTL comes in different ratings. The ratings imply amount of treatment soaked into the wood. Some wood is rated for "below-ground" usage. Some wood is rated for "above-ground usage only". If you want superior protection, you select the below-ground grade, knowing that even it would fail eventually if used below-ground.

PTL is made, by placing kiln-dried softwood lumber in a vacuum chamber. The chamber is evacuated and then filled with treatment fluid. The wood then takes advantage of the vacuum, drawing fluid deeper into the wood. This is why PTL is better than just "dunking" a stick of wood into a sealant. It's because a vacuum system improves the degree of penetration. By applying more vacuum cycles, you get slightly better penetration of the protectant.

Fungus grows up into untreated wood. The fungus can penetrate untreated wood to a distance of several feet.

The PTL chemical is intended to inhibit fungal growth. For example, copper or particles of copper, are good at killing just about everything.

When you cut a stick of PTL, there is a chemical in a can you can buy, to "seal the end". It's an alcohol-based material, with a copper compound (copper carbonate) in it. It likely works, but it penetrates the wood only to a shallow depth, and isn't likely to add measurably to the lifespan of the wood piece.

When PTL fails, the cross-section pattern looks like this.

The wooden core is untreated. No chemical makes it into the center of the wood. That's what happens for "above-ground" rated wood. The center part rots out and insects can live in there. The outer part (containing anti-fungal chemicals) is still intact.

When you cut the end of the wood, that exposes the juicy inner core and then fungus can grow.

This is why you want the *uncut* end of the lumber, touching the ground. As the uncut end contains chemical across the entire end to a depth of an inch or two.

You can treat the cut end with the chemical in the can stuff, but without vacuum assistance, it will not penetrate all that deeply.

Now, when softwood dries out, it cracks and shrinks. Quite frequently, the cracks are deep enough to expose the juicy core. If you lay PTL horizontally in sunlight, the rotting process will begin almost immediately. The wood dries and cracks in the sun, the cracks extend quite deeply into the wood. Your usage of a surface coat will likely retard such a process from happening. When I compare PTL in my back yard (with stain on it) versus the unprotected horizontal 4x4 PTL in the front yard, the front yard PTL is ready to be replaced again. Little green plants grow out of it now :-/

The last time I used PTL, I was surprised to find that a stain I bought, could be applied to the wood almost immediately, and the finish survived. Some instructions for PTL, suggest waiting a year. But if you can find a finish that seems to hold up, applying it immediately is probably the best practice. My back steps are 100% PTL, and with the red-colored stain applied, the finish is still in good shape. And the reason they're 100% PTL, is I did the steps previously with a mixture of treated and untreated wood, and that was a disaster. So this time, every stick of wood in those steps is PTL, and the finish coat was applied immediately.

PTL needs proper fasteners. It causes extreme corrosion to unprotected steel nails. Use hot-dipped galvanized nails or stainless fasteners. Even stainless fasteners get little spots of rust on them, to show that the stainless fastener does not have a consistent composition.

Even placing a steel L-bracket against a PTL post, results in surface rusting of the L-bracket. I put strips of electrical tape over the steel, to provide a tiny bit of isolation (just where it will be touching the wood).

Paul

Assuming the ground doesn't have a layer of debris such as dead leaves, how about simply putting a rubber foot on each leg? I've used large doorstops for this and it seems to work OK.

ICBW, but solvent-based preserver in polystyrene...?

and even if you use tins instead of pots, the solvent preservative soaking up the legs might upset the paint if it gets high enough ...

Dunno, but the yoghurt and cottage cheese pots I have are polypropylene (recycle no.5). They seems to cope with white spirit when cleaning paint brushes. OK, so wood preserver solvent may be different, in which case do a little experiment first to check, or use glass jars.

probably OK; mine are PS so not very useful for anything.

I screw on hardwood pads under each leg of my wooden garden furniture. Then replace those that rot. Strangely they don't all need replacing.

Mike

Did the balsa wood ones rot more quickly ? :-)

Balsa is a hardwood.

Bill