Cleaning sticky rubber off binoculars - suggestions?

replying to David, Iggy wrote: Old, oxidized rubber is best handled by sanding. Just like golf club grips. Sand the rubber down to fresh rubber, wash with dishwashing liquid and dry. You can fully restore the rubber to like-new with a 0000-Steel Wool rub-down and get it back to smooth and shiny.

I'd try some sort of alcohol, such as surgical spirit or meths. My wife has a computer keyboard and mouse which were covered in the same sort of non-slip rubber coating on the wrist rest (keyboard) and the sides that you gripped (mouse). After they had been left in the sun, they eventually went tacky and horrible. Logitech (the makers) suggested using surgical spirit to clean them. This removed the rubber coating altogether, back to the shiny plastic, which removed the gooey stickiness.

White spirit or turps might not be a good idea - they may dissolve some types of plastic.

I can't vouch for how well it will work on your binoculars but the surprising material of choice for cleaning depolymerised gunky vinyl plastic off things is brake fluid! I happened across some in my dad's garage clearing it out and so tried it on an old scrap vacuum cleaner handle that had gone yucky. Much to my surprise it worked really well although afterwards the smooth gloss plastic wasn't as easy to grip.

Good luck sanding a 0.3mm layer of rubber that's turned to gunge.

I find a Mk I thumbnail does the job of removing it for small areas.

Quick update.

White spirit doesn't shift anything.

Meths doesn't shift anything. (In both cases applying with a kitchen towel and looking for black marks on the paper towel.)

IsoPropyl alcohol lifts the gunge but seems to evaporate too quickly to clean up the resulting mess.

However by lucky chance I found that if the sticky gunge has been lifted a bit with the IPA then meths will wash the resulting mess off. Polishing the cloudy plastic with a clean piece of kitchen roll then buffs it up.

Not very pretty and some of the logos and stuff have lifted as well, but there are no longer sticky bits to turn your hands black (except in very out of the way "can't be arsed" corners).

Fortunately I found some IPA spray in an obscure "will come in useful some day" corner. Also some meths I haven't yet got round to drinking.

Cheers

Dave R

Be careful spraying IPA about it is excruciatingly painful in the eyes. Isopropyl Alcohol that is not the Indian Pale Ale.

Lovely smell but it leaves you a bit light heated if you snort too much of it :-)

Reminds me of when I was working in a chemistry lab during my year off before university. One of the other students was expensively-educated at "Mawlborough" (*) and was nephew of Lord Someone (he kept saying that he seen his uncle at "The House" (of Lords).

This lad had a flash sports car when most of us had crappy old bangers or even no car. And he described how he "started to feel a bit high" one sunny day when he was driving along the M4 and "discovered" an open bottom of ether in the back of his car (as you do!!). Ether vapour in air is hellishly explosive, so this lad had a very lucky escape. He was into every stimulant around: he would squirt fairly pure ethanol into his mouth from a wash bottle in the lab, and he described the effects of taking home an ampoule of GTN from the cyanide antidote kit. Having been prescribed GTN (glyceryl tri-nitrate) recently as a precaution in case of angina, after a heart attack, I can say that it had no effect whatsoever on me - I tried some so I would know what side effects to expect if I needed it for angina (which I haven't actually experienced).

(*) As opposed to "Marlborough" - why do EETs (expensively-educated twits) have their own pronunciations for places (or peerage titles) such as Marlborough, Althorp ("Orltrop"), Harewood ("Harwood") etc?

Now this is a perennial on this and other news groups. The problem is that the material itself is made as part of the plastic piece it covers. Once it starts to leech its contents, its going to carry on. I tried to remove some from an old portable tape player a while ago. it seems that at least in this case you can continue onward almost through the whole of the plastic part as if it was kind of graduated from semi hard plastic on one side to rubbery feel on the other.

I think if its one of those you are stuffed, but you may be lucky and its just a coating something like 3M Nextel or similar where normal paint solvents do work but underneath it the look is not good, normally quite badly finished plastic. Brian

You are assuming its really rubber. In most cases these days it is not, it may feel like it is, but its some weird plastic mix.

I managed to use Acetone on a handle once, but if you go too far no more plastic. Besides you can get high on acetone and never put it in a plastic container! Brian

Yeah, I'm reminded of my old Neal Cassette deck where one day the rubber pressure roller went very sticky, the next day ist was a pubddle on the deck metalwork leaving a plastic centre on the spindle. This machine will self destrut infive days?

Brian

uPVC solvent cleaner. *Not* the soapy water stuff.

Probably too late, but I've found talcum powder quite useful in such cases. It doesn't remove the sticky stuff, but it stops it from being sticky.

Just keep it away from the rotating parts of the lenses (for individual eye focussing), in case it gets inside. It will also probably need to be reapplied now and again.

Ah, memories!

Fairly pure alcohol; that is starting out at 95% and used for fixing and dehydrating biological sections on microscope slides.

A 500 ml plastic bottle of that and you could be very happy on an evening out at the pub just buying glasses of tonic water.

No hang over either.

Kids today.......

Dave R

You must make sure it's "Duty Paid" (*). Even Analar lab alcohol has methanol in it.

(* It was kept locked up in our lab, for the very reason you describe.)