Ultrasonic Cleaning

[hobda1ad]

I've heard a few places using ultrasonic cleaning for their tools. Does anyone have experience using this?

we do mostly automotive molding and a lot of clips and tabs, which means a lot of difficult to reach spots on a tool. I'm thinking ultrasonic cleaning could help us reduce our PM time but taking out the slides and inserts, putting them into a machine and walking away.

[Suhas]

Hi,
Yes, these work very well. I see them all the time when I walk through tool rooms.
You could also think of the dry ice blaster, that way you do not have to pull the mold out of the machine. I do not know the costs involved.
Regards,
Suhas

[rickbatey]

Ultrasonic is great but be careful of the cleaning media used in it. We had issue with the original cleaner eating the aluminum tags off the sides of the molds. That is the tags showing heater or cooling zones!!
Now dry ice is OK but very loud and the dirt has to go somewhere. Meaning that blasting a mold in press blows the dirt off into the floor and around the other machines. We use them for cleaning fretting off the outside of mold base. That stuff isn't good when you mount molds with magnets.
Rick

[iautry1973]

We priced out a cold jet unit once. It ended up being pretty expensive. I think it was like 10k plus for it. We ended up with a ultrasonic cleaner and it worked pretty good for most parts.

[JayDub]

Place I worked at a decade ago bought a dry ice unit. It was very good for cleaning large tools in the press. I don't recall what the price was - obviously not prohibitive - but the media (dry ice pellets) was pretty spendy and the biggest drawback was it had a very limited shelf life.

[hobda1ad]

I'm pretty Leary about a dry Ice unit, Our press size is up to 240 Ton so pretty small tooling. We use a large number of mud units which makes an ultrasonic machine an obvious candidate, There are typically a lot of deep areas where I have to use a dental pick and filed stone This is an example of our typical tool. Who are the common manufacturers of the ultrasonic machines? I've see quite a few and I know you get what you pay for.

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[Lonewolf]

We have an ultrasonic cleaner that we've used maybe a dozen or so times and now it sits idle. We picked up a dry ice unit and use it rather extensively on even small molds making small parts and we techs and the tool rooms much prefer it. I've found that using "rice" dry ice or crushing it to small pieces first works much better than using chunks for the dry ice machine to shave as it runs.
No idea of initial costs.

[tommygolf85]

We have a Cold Jet Ice Blaster along with a Ice Press that takes the dry ice and presses into a nice block. It works very well for what we need it to do, pulling the mold all the time to clean it good just is not a great option for our business, I do think it was a sizable investment I want to say it was over $20,000 but our boss and the tool room are happy with it.