Can anyone tell me what is in the cleaning solution that is supplied
with an ionic cleaner? I have looked through the archives until I’m
cross-eyed and all I really found is an email I posted 5 years ago
asking the same question (no answers, though). Or, if not what
Speed-Brite supplies, what should work well? I’m no chemist…
As I have mentioned before, my anodizing power supply, with the
leads reversed, works well as an ionic cleaner, but I suspect that
there is something better to use with it that the tsp I use in
anodizing.
Yesterday, as an experiment, I built another ionic cleaner out of a
phone adaptor. Cut off the jack, split the two wites, attached
alligator clips. The positive goes to a stainless steel anode, the
negative to the tarnished silver, put both in the cleaning solution.
This appears to work, not quite as well, seemingly, as my anodizer,
but anyone can build one for nothing, since these adaptors are left
when phones and other devices die.
I used this same device today to electro-etch. I tried naval jelly
to electro-etch silver, and it worked pretty well, though I suspect
it would work better in a more fluid form of phosphoric acid.
One other discovery: if you attach the ionic cleaner with the
opposite polarity (negative to stainless steel, positive to silver),
at least if using tsp as the solution, it creates a very deep black
patina on the silver! The ionic cleaner set-up does not really fully
remove this black, but it is not difficult to steel-wool off the
highlights. That’s as far as I’ve explored this, so far.
Noel