I am trying to squeeze every last day working day out of this fall so I am just finishing a fence. Treated fence boards so I wont stain those this year. I want to stain the posts etc b4 I put on the fence boards.
My plan was to use an oil based stain because much of this salvaged wood that I had previously oil stained.
Our days get up to 12 degrees (celsuis) but last night was minus 10 degrees. I thought that if I stained around 10 am, that would give things about 6 hours of reasonable warmth but the nights will probably be below zero.
What do you think would happen if I proceed and the stain does freeze? My thougths are that an oil stain won't suffer damage like a latex.

 

What does the label on the stain say?

 

You are safer using oil stain at this time of year. The old rule of thumb used to be you could paint at 50` and rising and needed to quit at 55` and falling. Paint has changed a lot over the years, extending the tempatures in which a lot of paints can be used. As Evan said check with the label and if you purchased the stain from a paint store they should be able to best answer your question.

Oil paint doesn't freeze like latex does. The temp does affect how it dries and sometimes how well it will bond to the surface. Surface temp is just as important as air temp.

 

Strangely enough, the paint can doesn't say but I know it would say not to do it at this time of year . I guess I should have asked, what happens if you pretend you can't read and go ahead. If the worst problem is that it takes a week to dry, I'm OK with that. However if the stain will crystalize and fall off which means I would need to rip everything apart and sand it all down next spring. That would influence my choice.
I may just bring the beams home and stain them in my garage. Not the end of the world but not very convenient.

 

That's very strange
You'll want to find out what the manufacturer says
There are some low temp paints out there, yours could be OK
In my mind -10*C is too cold
I don't use anything that would work at close to that temp

 

I have a General Paint (Canada) stain that only gives approx drying times at certain temps and humidity. I may be missing something in the fine print. I'll call GP tomorrow. The forecast calls for a low of 3 degrees on Wed, so I'll see if that will work.