Reply To: My first workbench
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The sap will eventually crystallize and stop running, so it’s not all bleak.
You can get small amounts off with most any salad oils if the sap is fresh, followed by a cleaning with soap and water to get the oil off.
A more effective solvent is alcohol. You know that gallon of hand sanitizer you bought at the start of the pandemic? You can now put some to good use, as it’s 70+% gelled alcohol. Work it into the sap and wipe off. Turpentine also work, but I avoid that, as most turps sold nowadays is a heavy metal nightmare with all the driers in it.
Once you have cleaned the sap off so it isn’t s sticking mess, you can seal the wood with shellac, which will greatly slow or stop the flow of the resin. This won’t work on a glue surface, as the shellac doesn’t play nice with the glue. The best strategy there is clean, then glue up right away and hope you have done a good enough fitting job on the glue surfaces to trap l the resin in until it hardens.
Or set that wood aside for a year until the sap stops and use it for a future project.