Posted by David Sherman on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 14:43:27 :
In Reply to: easiest way to clean big parts posted by derek on Saturday, October 27, 2007 at 22:48:21 :
I usually scrape off the worst of the gunk, hold it over (or put it in) a bucket with a pint or two of gasoline, wear rubber gloves, and have at it with a brush and gasoline. I've tried lots of other stuff, but gasoline still works best for the money. If it needs to get painted, I'll do a final cleaning with lacquer thinner. As for disposal, I guess I kind of use a "modified hillbilly method". Either leave it in the bucket till it evaporates and put the residue in the garbage, or use the brush to splatter it on weeds (if I have weeds to kill), or use it to start fires (if I have slash to burn). I don't dump it straight onto the ground, though, because then most of it will soak in before it evaporates and it doesn't take much to ruin the ground water.
When we rebuilt the mucker at the mine tour, we took all the greasy parts up to the Morning shop, and they did them in their big automatic cleaner. It has a side-opening door so you can get heavy things in without lifting them, and you just close the door and push a button and it sprays solvent all over the parts automatically. That's the way to go!
When I worked at Fluke, we had a Freon tank for cleaning the flux off of electronic circuit boards. Any contamination in the Freon was bad because it left residue on the boards. One weekend, an engineer came in and used the Freon tank to clean the carburetor off his car. It did a great job on the carburetor but they had to replace all the Freon in the tank, and clean it out thoroughly. I don't think they quite fired him, because he was an important engineer, but the production boss sure chewed his ass over it. They don't allow freon tanks any more, so I'm not sure how they clean the boards.