Just in case Todd’s description isn’t clear, it’s important that you
totally immerse the nozzle of the steamer in the liquid. In fact, it
works best when you press the tip of the nozzle down to the bottom of
the jar, in the center, not to the side. And you need to have enough
liquid so the nozzle is immersed several inches. Be sure to step very
lightly on the pedal, so only a little steam is released. If you hit
it full blast, or if the nozzle isn’t far enough under the liquid,
then you’ll blast the entire jar’s worth of liquid, and perhaps your
jewelry item too, out of the jar. Not nice. If your steamer is one
with a solenoid valve that’s either full on or off, so you can’t
control the amount of steam, you may have to experiment to find how
much liquid needs to be there for this to work. It may take something
larger than a baby food jar.
I use this method routinely at my work, to heat plain water, such as
when I need a little quick boiling water to make up a little liver of
sulphur solution. For mea, a 600 ml beaker about 1/3 to 1/2 full of
water works well for this, and if that’s more water than I need, I
pour off the excess after steaming. But I’d confess that I’d be a bit
leery of doing this with anything more reactive than water. Alcohol?
Maybe. But be sure to wear safety glasses just in case (good advice
doing this with water too.)
I first learned to use the steamer to boil water many decades ago,
back when I was still kinda foolish (these days, I pretend to have
learned some wisdom and caution…). We’d put about a cup of water in
a quart pitcher, put in gold jewelry needing cleaning, add a half
teaspoon or so of potassium cyanide powder, boil the solution with
the steamer, then pour in a “glug” or so of concentrated (30%)
hydrogen peroxide. The pitcher had to be angled and low in the sink
so when the result “burst”, sort of a soft slow explosion, the liquid
ejected from the pitcher stayed in the sink. This process, called
bombing, really shouldn’t be done this way, without proper fume and
waste control (properly, it should be done in a fume hood, with the
means to collect and process the waste liquids). And we were just
running the liquid down the drain. Not good. Most of the cyanide gets
converted to safer (but not totally safe) cyanate compounds, but
remaining cyanide residues in the waste water was probably illegal,
and throwing away the dissolved gold, even at the then much lower
gold prices, was just a waste. But it sure put a pretty bright gold
finish on the jewelry… (and gave me a bit of a headache
sometimes… No doubt killing brain cells…)
In my home shop now, I simply bought a little cheap microwave (one
of those black friday deals at Target. Something like 30 bucks…)
that sits next to the steamer. Much safer. It also can safely heat up
plating solutions (just don’t use this microwave for food). And a
nice little magnetic tumbler totally eliminates the need to bomb
things, as it gets into almost as many details, and does so more
reliably on more metals than bombing works on.
And frankly, rather than directly heating the alcohol to remove
shellac, I’d suggest simply using your ultrasonic cleaner. Get a
small strainer basket that you can set across the cleaner, that will
support your alcohol jar about halfway immersed in the cleaner. The
ultrasonic action will warm up the alcohol reasonably quickly even
if your cleaner isn’t itself heated. Takes a little longer perhaps
than boiling the alcohol with steam, but not by all that much. The
advantage is simply that you’re not then risking blasting a bunch of
alcohol in your face, or filling the room with alcohol fumes.
Peter