A Simple Home Made Ionic Cleaner

The folks at Speed Brite make a great product. I own two of them and recommend them highly. One of the main advantages of a Speed Brite over the unit I describe here is that you cannot screw up with the Speed Brite. You can screw up with this rig.

Speed Brite has an automatic shut off that prevents the process from going too long. With the setup I am describing you can accidentally forget about the piece, leave it in too long and cause yourself lots of extra work.

The Speed Brite unit puts out 13.3 volts. This unit, nominally 12 volts, puts out 17 volts. I used this one because it was there. I suspect a nominally 9 volt unit would work at least as well.

Caveats done, here it is.... These are thumbnails, click for a larger image.

This is what the unit looks like. I have cut off the 12v connector, separated the wires and terminated them in two alligator clips from Radio Shack. It is a good idea to use two different colored clips so you know what goes where.

This is the name plate. It was from a NiMh battery charger that bit the dust.

This is a beaker, tantalum foil wrapped in fiberglass window screen and Speed Brite Gem Sparkle solution. The positive side of the charger should connect to the anode (tantalum foil in this case) The negative side should attach to the jewelry to be cleaned.

Stainless steel or titanium would work for the anode. You can get titanium sheet from Reactive Metals. It is very inexpensive. The tantalum foil is extremely expensive. I've had it for years and have never figured out how to use it in jewelry so it ends up being a great anode or cathode as the situation dictates.

The fiberglass screen helps prevent shorting out the transformer.

No voltage tester, no problem. Polarity is easy to determine. Take a piece of scrap silver and try it out. If you have the leads right, positive to the bath, negative to the jewelry, the solution will bubble vigorously around the piece and your silver will look like this after 10 seconds in the bath.

If you have it reversed there will be little or no bubbling and your piece will look like this after 10 seconds in the bath.

Here is a piece returned to us for cleaning from the Randy J. Braun Gallery in Makawao, Maui. Hawaii is hell on silver.

Here is the same piece after dipping it halfway for about 10 seconds. You can see the line just above the pearls. I do this in 5 or 10 second increments. If a spot is stubborn it probably needs to be brush cleaned to remove oils or dirt before being returned to the bath. Oils and dirt will stop this low voltage and prevent cleaning.

Here it is after a little boar bristle scrubbing and a total of about 30 seconds in the bath. After this I throw it into a vibratory tumbler for a day and it comes out like new.

While I was taking the pictures and cleaning these pieces I wondered if baking soda would work. This picture shows the results. Here are the matching earrings, one cleaned, the other as it came back.

I used baking soda and hot tap water as a solution and aluminum foil as the anode. It went much slower than the Speed Brite solution and didn't seem to work as well. I added Arm and Hammer washing Soda and that helped. Brush cleaning helped some more. There were still a few small problem spots. I finally finished it off in the Speed Brite. From this one experiment I'd say that the Speed Brite Gem Sparkle is the way to go but baking soda will do a lot.

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John Flynn