Ultrasonic cleaning of shutters

[steven_e007]

Hi,

I bought myself one of those little ultrasonic cleaners to clean a few sticky shutters. The instructions say to use water - but I certainly don't fancy dunking my shutters in that!

Has anyone used one of these to clean shutters - and any advice on a suitable solvent?

Thanks

 

[jochen]

Hello Steve,
here in our laboratory we have some of these ultrasonic cleaning baths, we use ISOPAR M from EXXON MOBIL, you also can use white spirit or cigarette lighter fluid; but be careful as these solvent has a very low flash point. If you run your cleaning bath for a longer time the filling gets warm and the risk of ignition gets higher. Maybe you can put he shutter together with the solvent into a little glas with a screw lid. Then you can immerse it into the water filled ultrasonic bath.

 

[matt S]

Hi Steven,

I use an ultrasonic cleaner all the time for camera (and wristwatch) parts. I have never submerged an entire shutter, but gears and shutter blades go in all the time. I use a three step process- first step is a wash and the next two steps are rinses. Each bath is about 7 minutes long.

I just use the watchmaking wash and rinse stuff and have never had a problem. The L&R ultrasonic stuff is one brand of wash (which I use), but many others make similar stuff.

Some examples: http://www.ofrei.com/page_224.html

I put the solutions in small jars (big enough for a shutter) and then place the jar into the ultrasonic machine filled with water. This way I can re-use the solution- it is expensive, but it does last a long time.

Good Luck,

Matt

 

[unclemack]

I often wondered while servicing shutters whether one of those new (at that time) ultrasonic gizmos might work but for various reasons never did try one.
Been retired 10 years but I'm still very curious to learn how effective you find it to be - if you don't mind posting your findings?
I did actually try a vibrating table with a container of various solvents. Wasn't effective enough to be used in practice.

 

[steven_e007]

Thanks for the advice - placing a sealed container with the solvent into the water bath makes a lot of sense.

I'll give it a go and post my results here - in a week or two...

 

[Tom1956]

Picking up this old thread. Now that I'm finally considering some sort of ultrasonic machine for cleaning shutters, I've investigated the supplies needed. One of them appears to be a 50 dollar-a-gallon cleaner. I would feel very foolish to spend $50 on such a cleaner only to take the top off the bottle and smell the distinctive smell of a common cleaner, sold under such names as Purple Power, Awesome Cleaner, purple soap, and umpteen other names for the same chemical, for a whole lot less than 50 bucks.

 

[shutterfinger]

90% Isopropyl Alcohol should work fine.