Lovely looking white sails...I don't have 'em

[XQSME]

What would you say is an effective and low cost method of restoring / cleaning my old sails at home at the end of this season??

[trebor]

When I clean my sails, I do it in the bath, I use products that are for personal use, if they are safe for us they should be safe for sails, you will need to spot clean bad areas.
I have also cleaned them by the jetty, but only when they are dirty from an inversion, but I suppose you could do a general clean this way.

[chris]

Assuming these are terrylene dacron or so on...I was advised by a sailmaker to use an oxy-whatever such as vanish and soak them overnight then a very light scrubbing with something soft like a nail brush if needed. Then Hang up and rinse well. Hoisting them on the mast and supporting the mast horizontal between trees works best while you hose them down.

On a very knackered sail from 1969 I wetted them well and ironed then on a 2' x8' piece of melamine chipboard. No chemicals other than H2O Steam cleaned as pressed nicely at the same time.

[XQSME]

Thanks Chris - mine are 1969 too, I'll try the ironing trick ...

[chris]

I should have added.. in the end grubby sails in better condition are more enjoyable than clean ones that are ruined!
But the ones I have cleaned and ironed are certainly improved in shape as well as appearance.

There are rust stain removers available in hardware shops. (eg stain devils) These work and I haven't found they damage dacron but I have tested them on cotton and they can rot the cotton if you have to apply more than once. I gather they work, not as a bleach, but turning the iron oxide into another chemical that is colourless. (Im no chemist by the way!) So they can work but test on a sail you don't care about first.

[JimC]

I gather they work, not as a bleach, but turning the iron oxide into another chemical that is colourless.

That's more or less how bleaches work too.
There are basically two ways of making things look better, and we could call them washing and bleaching.
We could say that washing is the process of flushing the unwanted off without changing it chemically, and tends to be (physical damage aside) less risky.
So for bleaching you have to pick a cleaning chemical that reacts with the stain but leaves the parent material untouched. This can be a tall order. In my industrial chemistry days we were once asked to produce a material that would remove nylon coating from aluminium. Removing the aluminium from the nylon would have been a lot easier!