isopropyl alcohol

[Turves]

I have a Canon RF with green spots on the metal base and dirt on the upper works. Is isopropyl good for that or can it damage?

Is it also OK to use on lens and rangefinder glass?

Camer at this stage is only a display item until get a pro to fix it.

Thanks.

 

[john neal]

Try wine vinegar or fixer on the green spots before steel wool

 

[FallisPhoto]

I have a Canon RF with green spots on the metal base and dirt on the upper works. Is isopropyl good for that or can it damage?

Is it also OK to use on lens and rangefinder glass?

Camer at this stage is only a display item until get a pro to fix it.

Thanks.

Isopropyl alcohol can damge some plastics (notably the plastic fresnel screens in SLRs and some TLRs). Other than that, it is fairly harmless. I don't see how it is going to help any when it comes to cleaning metal though. Also, if you are talking about alcohol gotten from a drugstore, it is, at very best, 90% pure. God alone knows what else is in there. It just isn't the cleanest thing you can use, and it is of doubtful benefeit, since it won't really do anything to verdigris and something with 10% contaminants is the last thing you'd ever want to use on glass. For cleaning the upper glass parts, I'd use distilled water. It's about $1 per gallon at the local grocery store and it evaporates cleanly, leaving no residue. I'd also be VERY careful when cleaning the mirrors. Some mirror coatings (especially the deposited aluminum vapor on some semitransparent mirrors) are notorious for sticking to pretty much everything better than they do to the glass.

For cleaning metal, take a page from the military and get a can of Nevr-Dull metal polish. It is very low abrasive and will clean and polish metal without leaving scratches. That should work for everything but stained aluminum (for that, you pretty much always use #0000 steel wool). The reason is that aluminum, when it cools, forms a very tough (but very thin) "skin" over a slightly softer and darker core. The "stain" is where the hard skin has been eaten or abraded away and the softer aluminum is showing through. Just cleaning and polishing it won't do any good because the colors of the metals won't quite match. You have to remove the skin (just a few microns thick).

 

[mjflory]

Try wine vinegar or fixer on the green spots before steel wool

I could imagine wine vinegar and stop bath acting the same way, as they're both based on acetic acid, but why fixer?

 

[FallisPhoto]

Wine vinegar? Fixer? White vinegar maybe. Dilluted white vinegar is a good glass cleaner. What the hell would fixer do to it though? Oh. Uh... just because it is called fixer doesn't mean it will repair things.

 

[Justin Smith]

I used Flitz paste polish on a Fed-2's green spots with much success. I usually apply and polish with a cotton swab, then buff off with an old T-shirt.

 

[Sparrow]

A slice of lemon dipped in table-salt and just rubbed across the corrosion makes that green stuff (verdigris) vanish as if by magic, cleans copper pans in seconds too

 

[Bill58]

Use this to remove dirt, grime, corrosion: Renaissance Metal De-Corroder; use this to clean metal: Pre-lim surface cleaner; use this to polish preserve metal: Renaissance Wax. All available from:http://www.picreator.co.uk/index.shtml or most any fine hardware store.