ultrasonic cleaner

[cteno4]

got a gummed up engine truck? An ultrasonic cleaner may just be the ticket to clean it easily. I have a little baby one that is great for small parts like this. These work by putting ultrasonic waves through your cleaning solution to help knock off the encrusted bits. helps as you dont need to soak your parts for a long time and the gunk comes off every surface. amazing to watch it all come out in a few minutes into the cleaning solution!

 

I got my little guy at harbor freight for about $25 on sale. cheap and perfect size for cleaning little parts.

 

http://www.harborfreight.com/ultrasonic-cleaner-3305.html

 

it has a small little tank and you can also just float smaller containers of cleaning solution in the tank's water bath. i use little plastic condiment containers that come with the take away so i have a minimal solution to use and parts are easy to drain or dump out of these. i use a mesh tea strainer to drain things so as to not loose small parts. you can also use one of those mesh tea ball scissor thingies (the ones you can open with a pinch on the handle and the mesh scoop ends clamshells up some tea and you plunk into the cup) to just easily pull the parts from one bath to another, but i find thats more trouble than its worth.

 

for trucks i use a dilute dish solution first a couple of times for a few minutes, followed by water, followed by 70% isopropyl alcohol and a light blow dry.

 

also great for cleaning small metal castings or plastic parts before painting to remove any mould release, etc on the castings.

 

the cleaner can also be used for stripping paint off of metal and plastic. on metal castings, most paint comes off pretty quickly. on plastic you may have to use a solvent like isopropyl alcohol to help loosen the paint. i have stripped kato containers pretty clean with this combo. i also went at the containers with a soft tooth brush as well to get the bulk of the paint off then the ultrasonic cleaner popped out the little bits in the cracks you would never get out by hand or just soaking.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

I have an ultrasonic cleaner as well. It works quite nice for the most part. Mine is a really cheap one that needs a bit of rest after running it for 2 cycles in a row. I'm considering getting a somewhat bigger one that can run continuously, but on the other hand, I don't really use it all that often :)

[cteno4]

this little guy i have is holding in there. gets intermittant use and i only usually do the 10 min timed cycles it does a few time per use so pretty gentle duty. it seems to do well cleaning stuff, i have used larger ones, but you do need to be careful what you put in and combinations of materials to the really strong ones as parts can rub and cause ware in some situations of power and freq. so the little guy seems safe and easy for the little cleaning and stripping i do now and then. also its cheap!

 

cheers

 

jeff