Im a gadget person, my kitchen is filled with various devices of cooking rather than just a stove. Some more useful than others. As such I bought an Ultra Sonic Cleaner the other day for clean carbs and other small parts in. Ive been google searching about cleaning solutions. Seems that for everyone you read that someone likes, there is someone else who tells you that its junk. Some of the solutions can get quite expensive and I dont want to waste money I dont need to. Im curouis if any of you guys have an ultrasonic and want to know what you guys think works and what doesnt. Specifically for aluminum. I like to pick up cheap Holleys at swap meets. Rebuild them and get them back on cars rather than languishing on a shelf for decades. So thats mostly what I bought this for. I did a test run last night with a 50/50 mix of some knock off Pine-Sol and Distilled Water. It cleaned a fuel bowl but it wasnt an earth-shattering success. Im not opposed to buying one of the expensive mixes if they really work. I just dont want to waste money if simple green and Dawn will do the same thing.
I've used Pine Sol, Simple Green, Simple Green Extreme, Krud Kutter, Dawn and Mean Green. Once they are cloudy, all of them are junk. They say to use distilled water because it works better. No ions in the water or something. A hand full of dirt really renders the cleaner useless. At first, I thought I'd be re-using the stuff. $30 a gallon Extreme worked good, once. I started trying less expensive cleaners. Krud Kutter is acid, unlike the others. Works well. Lately, my favorite is Mean Green (Rustoleum). $11/gallon at Harbor Freight. I use it 4oz/gal. (If I was only doing one carb, I might use it full strength) I boil the water on the stove (the heater is slow), dump it in and then add the cleaner. I like it. I clean the "aluminum" parts first, iron and rust in the solution can darken the cast parts. I then do the metal stuff and dump the cleaner. Once dirty, the cavitation action goes away quick. I have done a couple of hundred carbs since I got the ultrasonic. It is great but, has it's limitations. There is still some picking and hand cleaning on the really cobby ones. The pine stuff leaves an oily film that you end up having to clean off, stunk the whole shop up too. I also use a 20gal solvent tank and a Gunk gallon carb dunk can. They each have their strengths. Especially on hard varnish. All of them get soda blasted after cleaning. Really makes them look nice. If one is muddy or extra greasy, I pre-clean the big mung off before the ultrasonic. Helps give the solution a chance, before it gets dirty (and useless). Enjoy your new tool. Mine is indispensable. Mike
Thank you. Thats exactly the type of info I was looking for. I for sure would have tried to continue re-using the fluid. I honestly used distilled water because I had some handy from filling a radiator and I dont have running water in the garage. We used to use De-Ionized water at work for cleaning optics. Im not sure if distilled water is inherently de-ionized.
we have a small ultra sonic . works great , my son uses distilled vinegar for motocycle carbs , some water mixed in
I was probably thinking de-ionized. I saw that, and the muddy looking crap in the tank, and thought "no shit !". I think anything clean will outperform anything dirty. You can see it in the amount of bubble activity clean vs. dirty. Hot water (HOT) helps a bunch too. I think the closer to boiling point, the more cavitation action you get. My heater can maintain well enough, you'll grow a beard waiting for it to heat a couple gallons up though. Mike
Yeah, in my trial run I set the heater to 60* C. It got there, but it took about 2 hours. De-I water is fairly common in industry, but Im not positive it would be easy to get your hands on at a local hardware store. Im not sure the hassle in getting it would be worth over using normal water from the hose or distilled water. I do also have a 20g solvent tank parts cleaner. It has the stuff that you can buy from tractor supply in it. Volitile but with a pretty high ignition temp. I think its basically kerosene.
We had a rather large ultrasonic cleaner at the lab I worked at. We used Alconox, an industrial cleaning powder. I honestly don't know where you can get it. Being a scientist had it's upsides: I gave someone else a list of stuff to buy, and it got to the lab... Anyway, it works on just about everything. I used it to clean greasy stuff, gunked-up stuff, and probably anything else you can imagine over the years, just be careful with irreplaceable stuff to ensure it won't damage it. Oh and it can get flushed down the drain.
I have the one from the Harbor, it works great. I use Simple Green and water. Everything I put through it comes out clean. The Harley carb I put through it looks brand new.
Love mine, always trying different combos but distilled water with simple green works great. Also had luck with just distilled water and dish soap...but it doesn't matter what I'm using, it always gets a splash of Spray 9 for whatever reason haha.
Said it before, shall say it again:- Get yourself a plastic container that fits in the ultrasound bath- it can be a fair bit taller than the top of the tray. Put it in, fill the bath with water around it, then put your parts to clean in the plastic container. The ultrasound travels plenty fine through the water and plastic container, plus you can make the thing larger for little cost. Then, cleanup is massively simplified. Watch out using Pine Sol on tin plated parts- it'll also cause the top layer of uncoated Y-metal to be leeched off, leaving behind a dull gunmetal gray surface. Phil
I bought the cheapest/most common one Amazon had on sale. Working by the premise that I would use it infrequently and if it broke 3 years down the line I wasn't gonna worry too much. So far it's seen about 20 hours of use over 3 years and still all works properly. The generic ones all seem to be made at the same factory with different labels stuck on the front.
I watch a guy on youtube that does a lot of carb work .... he tried just about all the suggestions from all of his subscribers. After a year or so, he simply uses Berrymans carb cleaner in it .... Seems to work the best for him. He also later bought the larger size ultrasonic cleaner for his carb work, uses Berrymans in it. The original smaller cleaner he uses for other cleaning chores & uses the simple green or other solutions in it.
I have a 7 gal Sharpertek industrial ultrasonic cleaner. Like observed by a previous poster, the built in heater really struggles to heat the water. To get around this, I always fill my cleaner with hot tap water. The heater can easily maintain that temp. For cleaning carbs, I have found liquid Cascade Dishwasher Detergent to work very well. For carbs and parts with burnt on fuel/oil deposits, I use Ballistrol Gun Cleaner as a pre-soak/pre-clean to loosen up the crud. Most ultrasonic cleaner manufacturers do not reccommend using slovent based cleaners in the machines. The ultrasonic action will help the solvent vaporize easier. Especially if the stuff is heated! Not something you want in your garage!
Mine is a 15L with knob controls. It's a "ROVSUN". Today it looks more like this "MOPHORN". Mophorn 15L (Could only find a Rovsun 3L) I got the knobs so if it takes a poop, I have a chance of fixing it with parts from the hardware store. It takes about 2 gallons to cover up most carbs in it. The timer only turns off the ultrasound. You have to mind the heater. I put the whole thing on a timer so I can walk away from it. Mine has 360W of ultrasound and 500W heat. I think the Mophorn is 360/400. It's probably run 3-400 batches. So far, so good. As usual, I wish I got bigger. A 4100 fills it up. Mike
I used to have a neighbor who repaired antique clocks and watches. He had a couple of ultrasonic machines, and would let me use his older one for carbs now and then. Didn't seem to matter what I put in it for solution, they always required a bit of scrubbing. Devin
Do you remember which particular Alconox power you used? Amazon sells several as well as other vendors. There's a Laboratory Grade which sells for $40 for a 4# box and will make 52 gallons of solution. Sounds pretty inexpensive to me.
My ultrasonic is 23-24 years old, works excellent and was not cheap, 800 approx. has variable temp. I use simple green 50/50 for carb cleaning, I do quite a few motorbike carbs and have found that you need to keep solution clean or it will darken aluminum. Now the real “ cats ass” is a steamer, that gets things squeaky clean
It was in a poder form, in a carton that looked like a half gallon milk carton. That's all I remember. It's been two and a half years since I retired, and I was out of the lab by March of 2020, due to the lockdown. What I can tell you is our ultrasonic cleaner was a big sucker, probably 3 or so gallons. And we would use less than a quarter cup of the Alconox per run. We used tap water, and started with water as hot as came out of the tap. Which wasn't all that hot. You could wash your hands without adding cold. It would also heat the water to about 180 degrees Fahrenheit in about a half hour. We also had a small one that would hold all of the parts for a small carburetor like off of a generator. We used E85 in it once to clean up an old one off of a generator we were trying to test for emissions. Knowing how volatile that would be, we set up outside of the lab, and proceeded to clean the carburetor. 3 things. 1 it cleaned the carburetor beautifully, as like dissolves like. 2 it cleaned the carburetor beautifully, but dissolved a couple of soft metal or ??? plugs. We never could get it sealed up again. And 3 the ethanol in E85 evaporates really nicely when heated and agitated. And even though we were outside of the lab by a garage door, we were inside the door staying out of the summer sun. And the gasified ethanol drifted into the test cell. Where we were. Yup, you can guess the rest. Ethanol inhalation gets you REALLY fast. Certainly made the rest of the day interesting...
I use a mix of simple green in mine. Seems to work pretty well from my experience. Ill run it through a couple cycles and then put a fresh batch of mixture and run it through a couple more cycles and do a rinse and blow and have not had any issues. Keeps the wifeys jewelry nice also.
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