Re-coating Polariod prints

Hello!
I have some 4 x 5 Polaroid type 52 prints that are beginning to discolor. When they were shot I coated the prints per instructions using the tubes that came with the film. It seems that the coating is what is discoloring, my question is can they be recoated and what would I use? It seems to me that I remember in Ansel Adams book on Polaroid he talked about recoating the prints. Anybody else remember that? I can't find my copy of his book right now. Thanks!

I would strongly suggest copying the prints as best you can before attempting to recoat.

I have some of the coating sticks (because I have some very old Polaroid film packs) and it smells like alcohol which suggests it might be some kind of shellac. But I really don't know for certain. Alcohol will probably dissolve whatever is coated on the prints, though. I don't know what will happen to the print itself, though.

To me, they always had a vinegar smell. I don't have a lot of experience with shellac, though, so I'm not sure whether that fits.

Donald Qualls said:

To me, they always had a vinegar smell. I don't have a lot of experience with shellac, though, so I'm not sure whether that fits.

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I just swiped one on a print that doesn't matter. The stick itself smells like alcohol but the coating smells more like vinegar. The coating stick probably had a main goal of neutralizing the chemistry (and wiping some of it away), but it definitely applies a coating of something. Anyway, I let it dry (all smell gone) and cleaned it off with rubbing alcohol.

Now that was on a resin-coated print. I don't know that a polaroid will survive that cleaning. I once tried to clean some dirt off a small polaroid print (from a roll-pack, I think) and the image went with it.

Don Heisz said:

I once tried to clean some dirt off a small polaroid print (from a roll-pack, I think) and the image went with it.

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The "print" from peel-apart Polaroids is correctly a "receptor sheet" -- the image, diffusion transferred from the negative, is in the very top layer of whatever coating is applied at the factory, at least on prints of types that require a coater (likely also true of no-coater varieties; they're just chemically stable enough to last without that step). So yes, I wouldn't find it odd for anything that disturbs the overcoat to also damage the image.