ultrasonic cleaners?

myequation

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anyone use ultrasonic cleaners for camera parts?

I was given a cheap sonic "jelwery" cleaner.

wondering if it will be worth my time? Might be good for grungy parts or shutter mechanisms,s
 
Funny you should mention ultrasonic cleaners. One of my staff people just asked me if I wanted my wedding ring cleaned as she's started up the cleaner for other purposes. My ring now looks like new (except for the multitude of tiny statches).
I imagine such a cleaner would work quite well for grungy parts, particulary if filled with some form of grease solvent.
 
Bottom end cheap ones usually are rather ineffective - it is easy to stick a ultrasonic transducer to a tank, but hard to design such a system to have a efficient ultrasonic energy distribution, so that you'll often end up with a very partial cleaning success.

Higher end hobbyist ones and small workshop/dentists/opticians cleaners are good for camera parts cleaning, provided you use them with suitable cleaning fluids. In my experience, they won't speed up matters compared to solvent cleaning, but they eliminate its health, fire and environmental hazards.

It is no panacea, though, as you'll have to dry and relube whatever you put in there - it is only good for completely disassembled parts. Doing ultrasonic on partially assembled components will cause more problems than it eliminates.
 
It is no panacea, though, as you'll have to dry and relube whatever you put in there - it is only good for completely disassembled parts. Doing ultrasonic on partially assembled components will cause more problems than it eliminates.

Nonsense! http://www.certo6.com/gallery/shutter.html Yeah, this is sarcasm. Bonus points if you can tell what the most horribly wrong thing is that is happening in the photos.

Much later: (sigh) You NEVER allow metal parts to contact glass (not even a ceramic dog dish) in an ultrasonic cleaner. It pretty much guarantees you will get really tiny little sharp fragments of glass all through whatever you're cleaning.
 
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