i was fortunate to come by a great deal of used equipment today. most of it is quite old. some is painted and some is not. the wood ware that is painted looks great. what is not, will need some work. unfortunately, a great deal of wood ware was rotted and of no use. after seeing the difference painting makes in how things hold up, i will be sure that every exposed surface of my equipment is painted.
it is not just a matter of weathering or rotting. many of the joints on the supers were quite loose and will need some gorilla glue. this may well be due to the constant wetting and drying of the outside of the supers in our very wet weather.
oops paint is cheap. supers are not.
if and when i buy/make new stuff, i won't use real paint, just some linseed oil, or tung oil. maybe you oughta try it.
i know that linseed oil is the best stuff you can use for...ex. your windows.
with regular paint, you can paint them yearly and they'll look awfull after a year (interesting how the "yearly" phrase fits in:D), but if you paint with linseed oil, you're good for at least 5 years.
here the oils are more expensive. i can get latex house paint that has been colored wrong for 5 dollars or less a gallon. 1 gallon goes a long way although on this older stuff i'll have to do more than one coat.
Sometimes with old equipment a person needs to disassemble it, discard the worst/rotten parts and reassemble. I go with repainting it to make it last longer. With cheap or free equipment a $1.00 worth of paint can well be worth it. Even with only getting a few years use out of it.