Problems with decomposing/sticky rubber on Canon gear

CameraFawn wrote:

So I picked up my Canon 60mm Macro Lens after many months and I felt stickiness on the manual focus ring and at first thought that I must have spilt something on it the last time! So I began to wipe it down with a wet wipe thinking it would clear the stickiness .. well, I was in for a rude shock when I had black track marks all over my fingers and the stickiness just got worse and I wished I hadn't done it in the first place! Wow, my camera was stored well in a camera bag and never even went outdoors .. so this kind of decomposition is something I have not seen before. So I googled and here I am .. like someone suggested, I was seriously considering getting an anti-slip tape to stick on top of the rubber ring but I think that might not have looked all that flash with questionable results as to whether it would reall stick in the long run and what about that ugly join when you wrap it around. By the way trying to get a replacement rubber ring for this camera is near to impossible as it is nowhere to be found on the net. So here goes the solution I came up with:

I completely masked the lens except the rubber ring with masking tape .. only the ring was visible. I then cleaned the ring lightly with a cloth just to get off any obvious dust bits stuck on it. Not all will come off anyways. Then I sprayed two coats of Acrylic Top Coat - Clear Colour with some gloss. I had a can of this lying around from a car repair job. You can easily get this stuff from your local hardware store .. just the smallest can will do. I gave about 15 mins between the two coats. When it was dry it was touch dry without any stickiness and looked good too. I am thinking this will last for a while .., if you use the focal ring a lot I suppose at some later stage it may start to feel sticky again .., not sure but for now it seems to have fixed the sticky problem!

I picked up my 28-135 IS a while ago, and had the same symptoms - the manual focus ring was sticky. It turns out that the ring was plastic but it was coated with some rubbery stuff that deteriorated over time (in a drawer...). Well, just rubbing it off with some Goo gone on a rug took care of it. It is just the plastic now and like new.

I used surgical spirit which appears to have worked perfectly.

The white coating is called "Sulphur bloom", which is a polymer additive that leaches out, typically during rubber processing but could happen after years.  The stickiness problem is the rubber degradation due to de-vulcanization.  I am suffering from this one with my RZ and trying to clean it.  Once that starts, it is not going to stop, you just have to keep it clean as best you can until it becomes unusable.  Still, we can get a few ,more years out of our gear before that happens.  Unfortunately I stored my camera for about a year in an unairconditioned space, and that is what accelerated the problem.

I'm new to the photography scene and left my DSLR aside for a good amount of time so I encountered this as well. I took out the camera of 6 years and it was pretty sticky. I used goo gone with tissue, got bits of tissue stuck onto it but otherwise it seems to be not sticky? Maybe the petroleum properties of goo gone helped or the bits of tissue stuck on helped.

After applying it, I've managed to wash the black marks on my hands with normal soap, requires a good minute or longer scrub

Day 2

Have not used it intensely since, the goo gone seems to have dried, it doesn't feel oily but it feels like a waxed car cushion if that makes sense.

Will see if it goes back to sticky after using it in a week or so, my guess is that sweaty fingers + humid country is gonna cause stickiness to occur again.

same issue with a host of products even product which hardly have been handled