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Help removing dried pine sap from Royalex?

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Well, I had a moment of weakness and brought home another three seat Royalex Dagger Reflection 15 project this week, in Midnight Blue this time. It is badly sun faded and has a number of spots of mostly dried pine sap on the hull exterior I need to remove before attending to the faded surface. Most of it scraped off with the sharp edge of a narrow trowel so there's not much left to remove. I seem to remember reading that some solvents can damage Royalex so I'm a little leery of just digging into the big flammable cabinet and lining up gallon cans of acetone, paint thinner, MEK, turpentine etc and going to work to see what will remove the sap. I've also seen things about mayonnaise, hand cleaner, eye of newt and wing of bat.

Any advice would be welcome.

Thanks and best regards,


Lance
 
I've gotten away with using acetone on a cloth to soften it, then a good scraper card from Lee Valley to remove it (looks like a stainless steel credit card)
 
I grew up on a Christmas tree farm. As such, we had sap on all our saws, machetes, equipment, clothing, etc. We used Lestoil to remove sap. I haven't found anything that works better.
 
For most of my repair work on Royalex boats I've cleaned up sanded areas with isopropyl alcohol and never had hull damage. Maybe give that a try
 
As I think I understand things, as long as the solvent flashes off within a short time most things safe for vinyl in general should be OK for Royalex as long as the surface layer of vinyl is intact. The bottom of this canoe has a multitude of fine scratches from being dragged out of a private lake and up a low sandy bank onto a turf lawn for years but has no real deep scratches, scars or cracks so core damage likely is not an issue. Heck the canoe still has the 5-year warranty sticker and the sticker extolling the wonders of Royalex on it, albeit sun faded. The interior doesn't seem to have seen anything more abusive than flip-flops.

duNrd's suggestion to use Lestoil makes sense as it has pine based cleaners in it. The closest store to me that shows it in stock is a half hour away so getting it isn't the end of the world if I decide to get some.

I did find Mike M's thread on whether certain solvents would eat Royalex but it doesn't have an exact reference to just plain cleaning the surface as opposed to trying to digest the core.

At any rate, I'll give the alcohol a try in a bit. I just finished shortening my Honey-do list by milling, sanding and prepping some ash shelf supports and moldings for trimming out the basement staircase. Nancy wants to polyurethane them for me so......

I'll get on with cleaning the sap, seeing how much seat webbing I have on hand, working up an order for whatever webbing and other bits and pieces I need/want and remove the seats, thwart and handles for refinishing and eventual replacing of the rotted cane seat panels with webbing.

Best regards to all,


Lance
 
I cleaned up a very dirty, black spotted royalex hull last week with brillo pads and they worked great. I used four pads to do a 14' daggar caption and it
only took about a half hour.
 
I used one of those Mister Clean Magic Erasers to do the final cleanup of a boat that had been a bit neglected and stored under a Birch tree. It worked great.
Jim
 
The canoe was already scrubbed down with Oxyclean and melamine sponges (I'm told that's all a Magic Eraser is....) but that didn't remove the dried sap.

I needed to move two canoe hoists to make better use of overhead space so I got sidetracked for most of last evening. But I had paint thinner out to clean a brush for Nancy so I did hit a few smaller sap spots with that and had a fan blowing at the spots to dry then within a few seconds. I haven't been back downstairs yet to check those spots this morning. Hopefull I'll get them off today and pull all the fittings.

Best regards to all.


Lance
 
I used lacquer thinner on a heavily coated Royalex hull and it worked great. Try a small out of the way spot first.

Fitz
 
Mad River and Old Town recommend either alcohol or xylene (xylol), although not specific to removing resin or stains..

https://www.madrivercanoe.com/us/sit...tickyhulls.pdf

https://www.oldtowncanoe.com/blog/ar...-royalex-canoe

I had a white gelcoat canoe stained with pine resin spots and used abrasive bathroom cleaner to rub the resin and stains out since it's a dry powder and doesn't have solvents... the canoe was old and there wasn't much gloss left on the surface. The fine abrasive left the hull with a nice uniform matte finish. And the bleach removed the stain that had soaked into the porous gelcoat.

I don't think bleach would be good for vinyl since it can make some plastics become brittle and cracking results, esp with full-strength bleach being used. I've used Comet several times on getcoat with no bad effects over several years, always rinsing it off after applying to the entire hull.

PS... even though the label says "scratch free", there still are fine abrasives in it.

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It makes sense to start with the least damaging materials first. I like physically removing materials like pine sap. Scraping is good. I use razor blade scraper a lot, but maybe not on Royalex. Dine steel wool, Comet, are physically abrasive. I have had good success with acetone when the other methods don't work. Always do a small area first to test the effect. It helps to be careful and deliberate.

I started down a rabbit hole trying to clean up an aluminum drift boat hull. Some things are best left alone.
 
Thanks again everybody. The outer hull on this canoe is so rough that I may try using fine sandpaper to get the worst of the roughness off of it and if it won't buff smooth enough, for my first time, painting it. Time will tell.

Lance
 
Liquidish pine sap and dried pine sap are different. At least mine are. All our cars are covered in it. My three 130 feet pine trees are always drooling.

Alcohol and gasoline work pretty well when liquid but the scraper comes out for the dried.

My Q : Lestoil for new or old sap? Or both? That is one liquid I have not tried.
 
I can't help.

We once got a lot of pine sap drippings on a vehicle that my wife parked under pine trees at work. Absolutely nothing that was recommended on the internet worked. Of course, we didn't want to scrape or abrade the car paint with hard objects, so we admitted complete defeat and lived with the dried sap drips. She did change parking spots. The vehicle was already old and we eventually gave it to our son.

I wouldn't be concerned about aggressively scraping an old Royalex canoe, but I probably wouldn't bother. They all get uglified in various ways anyway if old and used hard.
 
Liquidish pine sap and dried pine sap are different. At least mine are. All our cars are covered in it. My three 130 feet pine trees are always drooling.

Alcohol and gasoline work pretty well when liquid but the scraper comes out for the dried.

My Q : Lestoil for new or old sap? Or both? That is one liquid I have not tried.

On the tree farm, we used Lestoil for "new" sap. When we were shearing the trees in late spring/summer, our machetes would get gunked up with sap and became less effective. Lestoil was very effective at removing the accumulated deposits of "new" sap.
 
A little late to reply to this thread but I have found the following to be a great way to dissolve sap, both fresh and dried:

Apply any kind of vegetable oil or butter to the sap. If it's in the sun or at least a little warm this helps. You can reapply some more oil/fat after a while. Go over and rub it with your fingers to work the oil into the sap. Then use regular soap or preferably that green or yellowish soft soap and the sap will wash of with ease.
 
Speaking from my experience with my Royalex OT Penobscot, a safety glass scraper, with its somewhat flexible single-edge razor blade, works well for hardened sap. Denatured alcohol has a tough time when it's hardened and will remove paint.

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