Has anyone tried to use ultrasonic cleaner to clean carbon out of vap tubes? I put my Tilley 606 vap into a beaker with Versa-Clean (an agressive detergent for cleaning lab glassware) and sonicated it for 20 minutes. After that clouds of black stuff started to come out of the tube into the solution. Looks like it worked! Look forward to trying the vaporizer in the lamp. Has anyone tried this method?
There was a topic here recently about this subject. I clean my own in an ultrasonic bath with a good cleaning agent, as do one or two others, and it generally works really well. However, the first one I tried it on was a well used Coleman dual-fuel and it just wouldn't budge the thick black lacquer (petrol additives?) covering it, no matter what cleaning agent I used. I wouldn't buy a used dual-fuel lantern in case it had been run on petrol. Cheers Trevor
You can start with water if you like because it's not the detergent or whatever that initially loosens the dirt. Apparently, it's something to do with the ultrasonic vibrations creating voids in the medium by cavitation. Although tiny, these voids collapse suddenly and that causes adjacent dirt particles to be loosened by the shock-waves created. Try Googling it for a better explanation. Having said that, using hot water, detergents, vinegar or whatever can only help. I've got an ultrasonic bath (from Lidl) which is designed for cleaning jewellery, watches and the like. I can't say I was hugely impressed with it's performance cleaning lamp parts, even using vinegar. Perhaps an industrial type bath might produce better results...
I use alkali cleaners like Decon 90 and Teknon 100, but I don't think these are readily available. David, I think you'd need something more powerful to clean lamp parts. I've got 3 U/S baths here in the lab where I work and when the smallest is working it's unpleasant to be anywhere near it. I run them in a separate room, sometimes with a couple of cardboard boxes over the top. The vibrations or sonic waves will easily push a heavy part around the bath. Cheers Trevor
Hmm, can't hear a thing when my ultrasonic bath is running... But that's the point, really - the vibrations are ultrasonic, so beyond the range of human hearing. It would probably have driven the dog daft, though (if I had one, that is... )
Correct. Normally (what is normal ?) it is common to put the object in a small vessel with the detergent and put both in the water filled US device. Off coarse it all depends on the size of the object to clean and of the US bath sizes.
