Hi,
I just bought a large (for our business) ultrasonic gun cleaner. What a job it does! Of course, most of the guns we get in to be cleaned are heavily laden with years of everything from WD-40 varnish to weed seeds and plain old dirt. One gun will discolor the solvent. I suspect that the solution will carry so much trash as to lose effectiveness fairly soon. The solution runs about $55 a gallon, which makes about 4 tanks of solution. It is a water soluable compound. Most of the contamination appears to be large enough to be visible to the naked eye.
I am considering doing two things.
One of them is to drain the tank with its built in bottom drain through some sort of filter into a container, then pour it back into the main tank. If it doesn't need cleaning too often, this would be cheap and easy. The tank holds 5 1/2 gallons.
The other idea is to use a pump to recirculate the fluid through a filter. This will come later either way, unless someone has a really brilliant idea.
But I need a filter. I'm sure there are tons of commercial filters out there to do the job. The company that makes my machine (Crest) builds a system for $1500. That is not an option at this point and cost.
I've thought of building a tube out of something clear to filter through then using something like cloth or coffee filters or maybe even paint filters stacked to remove the larger particles. Or maybe you guys know of a commercial filter that would be OK for the job.
I tend to find a lot of "thinkers" on our site with a lot of diverse knowledge, so I thought I would bounce it off your noggin's first. Any ideas?
Oh, and useful criteria would be: clear to see contamination and flow, easily openable container to change filters, and something that wouldn't be stopped up too readily.
Thanks,
David