We bough a 200+ (but not much more!) old farm house last year, and we're renovating slowly, but surely. Earlier in last year, we we discovered old hardwood floors under layers of linoleum on the second floor and, after sanding, we settled on tung oil to finish them.
Now, it would seems like we didn't properly remove all the excess oil while finishing and now there is a layer of white, sticky residue on the floor.
We do have one solution to clean that mess up at the moment: mineral spirit and really fine mineral wool. It works, but the problem is: it takes forever, a lot of spirit and a lot of mineral wool.
Mind you, I don't care spending the time necessary to save that floor, but I would still be really happy if anyone had a better solution, one that's more time and material effective, so we can concentrate on other parts of the house now 😉
Best Answer
In a closet or other inconspicuous area try applying pure undiluted orange oil in a thin layer. This will soften and extract the tung oil, then scrape the softened layer with a 4" or 8" wide razor scraper, periodically scraping off the scraper with a putty knife.
Then go over the floor with orange oil on a rag, then mineral spirits to remove the residue of orange oil. I haven't used this myself on hardwood, but have used it to remove adhesive from concrete.
I realize this may be just too expensive and perhaps sanding is the no nonense professional procedure, but sticky tung oil would probably gum up the sanding belts. And I just hate handling dust.
Edit If all you want to do is remove excess tung oil, maybe you could use an electric floor buffer with pads. Apply a thin layer of orange oil, let sit for 5 minutes or so then run the floor buffer with an absorbent pad over the oiled area. I would not use an electric buffer with highly volatile solvent like mineral spirits because of risk of fire or even explosion.