Attic Wood Leaking Sap

Turpentine works perfect for this purpose and it will not damage the quality of the wood.

Attic wood leaking sap. Hopefully not on your hands as you steady your walk through the attic. The sap when in live trees carries nutrients throughout the tree that helps to keep it alive. Amber or rosin is great if you save it and use it for stuff like stickum on tools etc. Much of the wood produced for framing lumber has pitch pockets or areas of crystalized resin.

Sap is just sugar and water. These materials slow the leakage by clogging the wood grain pores but will not stop it completely. Amber is fossilized resin. Similarly when a tree is damaged the sap can bleed out.

The reason it is leaking out of the wood there is because it looks like there was a particularliy resinous knot in the pine. When it is wet it is sticky and can rub off on clothing or attract dust and dirt. For a start you need to clean all the sap which is gradually crystallizing on the top of the affected wood. While there are complex chemical components found in tree sap it s easy to compare sap to blood.

It probably got hot enough in the attic and it melted out this happens over time through many heating and cooling cycles. Use a coarse plastic sponge to scrape the oozed resinous compounds and go over the surface of the wood with a clean towel. Sap can caused a problem on decks and in houses where wood beams are used for support. Usually if the wood is properly kiln dried it bakes away.

Treat the knot areas with extra coats of the finishing material. Just use a razor bladed scraper remove off the timber and let it be. You can try removing sap with several different cleaning techniques but there is a chance it will come back. Like kevin said the attic heat restores this to a liquid form and it flows out.