I'm cleaning up my 14' sup, which I had bought second hand, and the gaff tape that was used for rail tape is proving hard to get off. I removed half of it and the woven part came off but the dried adhesive was left behind. Some of the less deteriorated tape I managed to remove as one piece by heating with a hair dryer and slowly peeling it off.

Any ideas on getting the dried adhesive off without damaging the board? All the woven part of the tape is off. So far, I haven't resorted to turps (or a chisel).

Try eucalyptus oil. We use it to get glue residue off anything. Have used it on a fibreglass surfboard to remove residue of a deck grip, I would think it would be OK.

Tah guys. Shall try the eucalyptus first - anything else would be unAustralian. Although I've a funny feeling eucalyptus oil gets imported from South America these days.

It's a white Naish Jav too - I'll be extra careful DJ.

starc1ty said...
i just took deck grip off a surftech 4 hours tried a lot of different liquids found turps good and ended up with 6 blisters
lucky i love the new deck grip

Glad I don't need to do that yet. My white deck pad is still holding up pretty nicely thankfully.

Do a few 111km Hawkesbury Canoe Classics and that should harden your hands up - it worked for me, although my thumbs look more like lumps. The organisers recommend regularly washing your hands in turps to harden them up before the event...

Have used a product called De-Solv-it, which is a citrus based solution for removing allsorts of stuff , including gum glue, wont damage youre board either. Have sucessfully removed the left over base adhesive from old deck grip.

Just a follow up on this post.

I got some Oomph (De-Solv-It and Oomph were really the same type of citrus based cleaner). These are good at getting marks off and are clear solutions and don't leave any residue - and they smell good too. I'd probably use them more as a spot cleaner. For my job, the glue gunk was very thick and hard and nothing I had penetrated very far through it so it turned out to be a scrubbing elbow grease type of job.

At 1/5th of the price, turps worked better at big jobs like the one I had - you can soak the rag and being oil based it would stay on the rag longer which is good for scrubbing continuously on the thick gunk I had to rub off. The disadvantage of turps is the fumes and the harshness and sticky residue on the hands and board means a lot of washing afterwards.

I didn't have any eucalyptus oil at home to try and didn't go down the nail polish/acetone route but I think the latter would have been good too - but with even more overpowering fumes than turps.

I didn't get to the Prepsol type solutions either - another time perhaps.

Miracle remedy:

AEROGARD.


Gets anything off anything. Honest.

As a somewhat irrelevant aside, I have a bottle of orange citrus for removing glue. My dentist first used it when removing some glue residue and it tasted quite nice.