Seal the Deal

Overview

Objectives/Goals To determine which water sealant works the best on cedar and redwood. Methods/Materials Three different water sealants were tested on untreated cedar and redwood fencing boards. A control sample of each type of wood was also included. Two coats of the sealants were applied to each sample. The samples were than submerged in water for four days, weighing the samples every 12 hours to see how much water had been absorbed. Results The wood samples that were coated in Thompson's oil sealant had an average water absortion weight gain of 1.23 oz for the cedar samples and 6.5 oz for the redwood samples. With the Olympic oil sealant, the water absortion weight gain was 1.25 oz for the cedar wood samples and 1.18 oz for the redwood samples. Lastly, the results of the Olympic Water sealant was a water abortion weight gain of 1.2 oz for the cedar samples and 1.42 for the redwood samples. The cedar and redwoood samples were than average to get the net results which showed that the Olympic Oil based sealant worked overall the best for both types wood. Conclusions/Discussion The results proved my hypothesis correct. The Olympic oil-based sealant on both the cedar and redwood fence boards worked the best to seal out the water.

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Materials Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1227

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Materials Science and Engineering projects
• CSEF Materials Science and Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2008 project