How to clean melted polyurethane rollers. HELP!

Hi Meghan,

There was a recent string of comments on this sort of problem just about a week ago: try looking that up through the search of this site. My favorite “solution” came from Rick, who even tried to burn it off with fire! No luck!!

I had to clean a lithographic roller of the very same goo, and it was next to impossible. I tried every nasty chemical I knew, and it was finally resolved by mechanically scraping and wiping and cursing. Hey, I did not try dry ice and hitting it with a hammer! In the end, it was worth it, to get down to the original metal core. Rollers have never been cheap!

Jim

Paint stripper

Thanks John,

I’ll give that a try. I still have bits of the gunk in hard to access places. If the paint remover does its stuff it will ber easy to wash out of those area with a power washer.

Rick

Get the toughest kind, I would say, maybe for automotive paint.

Rubber roller rejuvenator may be vicious enough to break residues down but thick gooey pools have to be scraped off the hard way .

i ended up using Citristrip paint and varnish stripper.

i had to use it it a couple of times on some places, lost some paint, but overall it did the job and the press looks great.

thanks for all of your advice.

meghan

There is no advantage to buying those cheap rollers you end up replacing them in a year anyways. You should ask for a refund.

Just a bit of history:

Polyurethane rollers have not always been the cheapest things in the world, but have always had a limited life and an unexpected death.

I seem to recall in the 1970s that a polyurethane roller cost about $50.00 when a composition roller was about $7.00 for my 10x14 press.

John Henry

I’m with John Henry on this one. The rollers I had lasted for a dozen years or more before suddenly melting on me.

Rick