APV cleaning/maintenance thread?

[ukeman]

I'm sure there's lots of posts about cleaning / maintaining your devices spread around, and maybe even threads dedicated to cleaning your devices.

So please point me in their direction … or start giving your basic methods/tips for cleaning and maintaining mechanical devices here.

I know that most methods will apply to VV or other devices too but I've been collecting lots of mechanicals lately.

I'd love to see a thread devoted to cleaning all types and materials… we've got threads, contacts and bodies to keep clean and conductive.

 

[Richard75]

There's one very special tool that no mechanical user should be without...

A toothbrush! Buy a designated toothbrush (as soft as you can find) for your mechanicals. When it comes time for cleaning, just take everything apart (even the switch) and fill a glass with a little detergent and hot water. Piece by piece, run it under hot water. Dip and stir the toothbrush in the soapy water and scrub in the hard to reach areas, and pay special attention to any threads on the pieces. Clean the threads well, as they tend to be the places that get dirtiest the easiest. Rinse the soapy water off, and set to the side to dry (I wait until every piece is clean, then dry with a microfiber cloth). Even after drying, I let the pieces air dry for about an hour before I reassemble.

Now, for the contacts, cleaning depends on the material. If it's the ever common brass, you can use Mother's Mag and Aluminum Polish to brighten them up (and believe me, Mother's makes them shine!). This will also help with conductivity. Another method is to lightly scrape the bits that tough the battery and atomizer with sandpaper. This will also help conductivity, but won't look as pretty as polished contacts, in my opinion. You can also do this to any (pure!) silver/sterling pins. Obviously if your contacts are plated by anything (silver, nickel, gold, rhodium) it's best not to use any sort of abrasive, but I believe you can lightly polish them. But everything I've mentioned (except maybe silver) doesn't really tarnish enough to deserve a polishing, so I say leave them alone.

Now if your whole mod is brass or copper or whatnot, you can use Mother's to make the whole device shine, but polish it patiently. Even with aluminum, as I've discovered, a haphazard polishing job looks pretty bad. Polish the mod completely assembled... it just makes it easier and cleaner than polishing each piece separately. After the whole thing is polished, I like to take it apart for a cleaning/rinsing, just so there's no polish residue anywhere.

These are my methods, and by no means the standard ways to do things.

 

[ainako]

After I do an initial cleaning with dish soap and water when I buy a mech mod I clean it with eezox gun cleaner. Then I just use eezox for the subsequent cleanings unless I get her really dirty. Eezox is some seriously good stuff, keeps threads and contacts clean and in good working order for a good while even with hard use. Its a liquid but leaves very minimal residue so it doesn't attract and hold more dirt like noalax does. It also feels dry after you treat the metal with it. IMO eezox should be a staple for any mech mod user.

 

[Jerms]

I just use a tooth brush and soapy water. I'm open to other methods, but for now it's good enough for me.