I want to put a parts cleaner in my garage to clean up all the greasy, oily stuff that gets worked on. What solution should I use in the tank? The instructions with the tank say to not use anything that is flammable, volatile, etc. The stuff they sell as “parts cleaner” at the place I bought the rig says it is flammable, volatile, etc.
I did some Googling and found some stuff called Solution 2000http://www.envirosan.com/ that looks like it might do the trick. Anybody know anything about it?
What I mean by “green” is something water-based that doesn’t require special handling when you need to dispose of it. I’ve heard of Simple Green being used in parts washers but after cleaning, the parts have to be rinsed.
I realize that stuff like kerosene and Varsol will work but there is also the factor that the stuff should not be breathed in. I don’t want to trade lung damage for clean parts. (My dad was very mechanical and pooh-poohd those kinds of considerations and then I saw the long term effects of the disregard).
Also, what about some of the citrus products? Will they work for an extended period of time without having to be drained and replaced?
I’ve tried diesel and Simple Green, but for the engine work that I’ve done at home I just made up vats of Dawn dishwashing degergent. Hey, it gets my dishes clean enough, and it pulled enough oil out of the pores of iron castings to paint. Of course, I’d oil things down afterwards as needed.
Water based solvents like detergents can remove grease and grime from your miscellaneous parts, but they don’t make those chemicals disappear. Once you have greases and oils in solution (or in emulsion, actually) you now have the same disposal problem you had originally with the oily gunk itself. Only with a larger volume, including all the water.
Also, water isn’t really friendly to iron and steel. You’ll need to quickly dry the parts after rinsing, which can be problematic for things with complex internal surfaces and especially with small internal clearances where water’s surface tension will hold small drops in really inaccessible places. These tiny spots are then likely to rust.
( I’m thinking here of common home shop tasks like dunking the carb off your lawnmower, or the valve covers off the Chevy. )
Not saying that water based products are unacceptable, just that they have their own tradeoffs and limitations.
Professional garages usually employ a service to fill, then periodically drain, clean, and refill their parts washers. The solvents work really, really well, and the service company has responsibility for all environmental hazards. You might ask your local garage who they use, and check affordability. Presumably your washer will only require cleaning/refilling every several months, or even less often, unlike heavily intensive users like commercial garages. This may make it both safer and economically advantageous for you.
Or you might talk that high volume user, your friendly neighborhood shop owner, into letting you have some solvent from his tanks, and bringing it back some months later when dirty. Mixed with his high volume, it should be an almost imperceptible burden, maybe translating into a case of beer or a steak dinner. I know that in a shop I used to own, two or three gallons from our multiple washers would have been less than noticable, and I could have accommodated several friends’ home shops if asked.
I did that once to get the last glass beads out of a set of salvage motorcycle heads that I had just bead blasted. The freshly exposed aluminum oxidized in the hot water and steam, and the heads ended up looking about as bad as they did when I got them. :smack:
Lots of guys use gasoline. My father in law used to put his cigars out in it, and it never ignited (though I was always antsy about it). Kerosene and paint thinner and other light petroleum distillates are good too.
Green is nice, but you’re probably burning a dozen gallons of solvent a week in your car, so if you drive out of your way to buy something more environmentally friendly you may be undoing your own nice gesture. I think using kerosene and disposing of it through some approved processor is probably better than emulsifying all that metal and tar in Simple Green and letting the local sewer plant try to deal with it.
If you are worried about the flammability, you could buy a nonflammable solvent. Years ago I used Zep Safety Solve, and carbon tetrachloride before that (though it’s fallen into disfavor). Generally these have chlorine in them, chemically bound (they don’t smell of chlorine). Chlorinated organic solvents, though, do tend to be hard on the liver. I understand that toluene, which is a benzine ring with a methyl group on it IIRC, is favored by solvent addicts (its street name is “tolly”) in part because its long term damage is milder than that of methylene chloride, a nonflammable solvent that is so volatile it can cause ice to form on your paper towell as it dries.
One strategy is to choose something whose polarity matches that of what you are trying to remove. For example, if engine parts have lots of oil on them, and the oil is pretty much just nonpolar straight chains, fully hydrogenated, hexane would work better (you may recognize the smell from Carter’s Rubber Cement). A more polar solvent like acetone would be able to mix with water but would not dissolve oil as quickly.
If you do want something water based, there have for a few years now been many cleaners based on turpenes (the pleasant smelling group of chemicals that includes the scents of pine and citrus). They make great surfactants, so they wet oily parts well. They offer good sequestration, so you can dissolve a lot of oil and keep it in the solution (actually a suspension of micells, little beads of oil with surfactant shells with hydrophyllic surfaces).
But, overall, the bigger green issue is disposing of it someplace safe. Various processing plants can separate things out and reduce them pretty harmlessly, but septic tanks and sewer plants and your lawn can’t.