About a week ago, I mentioned that I was stripping some minis that had a lot of gunk in the nooks and crannies, and that I’d ordered a cheap ultrasonic jewelry cleaner to blast that stuff out.

Well, it was a good idea, at least.

Earlier in the week my “Clearmax 800” showed up.

I played around with this the afternoon it showed up, but in the interests of science I’m starting from scratch and taking pictures for this post.

Here’s a picture of one of the minis.  It soaked in Simple Green for two days, and has been brushed as thoroughly with a wire brush and toothbrush as my back would allow.  (Hunching over the sink gets old pretty quickly, huh?)

After running the cleaner for 30 minutes…

(The picture’s blurry because my camera refused to focus.  You should be able to see some stuff there, though.)

So, clearly, it’s loosened something.  That water was clean when I started.  But:

Clearly, there’s more gunk still on the mini than in the water.  In fact, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between the two

The cleaner I got is cheap, and annoying.  It runs for 3 minutes before shutting off.  So, to have it run for 30 minutes, I’ve got to press “On” 10 times.  Clearly, I can’t run it overnight or anything.  Maybe that would have better results, but my cats aren’t particularly interested in pushing the button for me.

So, overall, I’m going to have to call this a failure.  Maybe a more expensive, higher-end machine would have worked better… but I’m not going to drop $100 to find out.  I’ve since picked out all the gunk manually.

Maybe, at some point in the future, I’ll try filling the thing with simple green and running it just because, but I have no expectations of it working better.