I'm trying some Penetrol stuff now. On a small part of my old door, I laid down a coat that colored it completely. It was "Aluminum" color Rustoleum (which is metallic) mixed with penetrol to make a pretty watery mixture as far as I could tell. Anyways, it's laying very flat with no roller marks, so the penetrol is doing its job. I'm going to do 3 coats total, wetsanding after each coat starting with 1000 then end with 1500. The first coat seemed to color it completely so 3 coats should be more than enough.

If penetrol works the way it seems it is, the 50 dollar paint job got a lot easier because you can do 3 coats instead of 6.

The strange thing is this paint, it's called "aluminum" and its from Rustoleum professional... its got lots of metallic in it, but I found it hard to mix up.. there always seemed to be light and dark in the can. The color that ended up on the test area is uniform, but not very glossy. It looks kind of like sandpaper. We'll see how it will dry.

Anyways I am keeping my fingers crossed that using Penetrol somehow results in the final product being harder than the mineral spirit mixes. Though on my prof. test area, I cannot scratch off to the surface, I can still put lots of little designs in it with my fingernail. Other people say their rustoleum dried very hard so I'm not sure what's going on in my garage.