Hobby Basics - Cleaning your stuff

Today I had a very frustrating moment (to be honest moments): Since the wheather here is REALLY bad I loaded my wet palette, got my miniatures I wanted to paint and switched some nice music on. Then I wanted to do the first brush strokes and BÄMM! One brush stuck together nearly to the point and the other brush divided itself into two nice halves... And worse to that, my airbrush completely stopped working and I had to disassemble it completely. And oh boy... it was nearly completely glued together (although I cleaned it after every usage like I described earlier). After calmly counting to 10 and taking some deep breathes I gritted my teeth and set to the task of cleaning my stuff. The brushes are my everyday brushes and its not really a loss if I can't rescue them but with the airbrush it is somehting completely different.

Lesson learned Number 1:  Keep your brushes in safety from your cats. Seems they found a new toy to play with on my desk and made things even worse...
Lesson learned Number 2: The Vallejo Primer I reviewed some time ago is a bit more sticky than normal paint and a normal blow out and cleaning isn't enough.

To see the positive in this disaster I thought on doing another Hobby Basic post on cleaning your stuff the advanced way :)

The Ultrasonic Cleaner

One thing I can wholeheartedly recommend is buying an ultrasonic cleaner. If you are a spectacle wearer one may already be in your household. If not watch out for offers on discounters, supermarkets or warehouses. Or get them in a specialist store of your choice.

There are many different devices on the market with different power and accessories. I got mine in a local discounter for about 12 euros I think and for me this works so far.

Most of the ultrasonic cleaners come with a plastic sieve in which you can put the small parts of the stuff you want to be cleaned. So nothing easier than to disassemble your gun and throw everything into the sieve. Add some hand warm water into your cleaner and some cleaning agent of your choice: I just use some dish soap most of the time if I have some harder dirt I use the same stuff I us for cleaning my airbrush.

If you also want your brushes into this thing you also can do that but here you should be a bit more careful because nothing kills your brushes faster than a device which soaks your bristles and loosens the glue which keeps the hair in the ferrule. Just add them on top of everything and watch out that the bristle is not bended while it is cleaned.

So if everything is loaded up just switch your cleaner on and let it do its work. If one run doesn't suffice, just do it until you are satisfied. One thing I noticed is that the plastic sieve takes of a bit of power of my cleaner so if I only have some bigger  parts to be cleaned I throw just everything into the cleaner and give it a go.

Hope this was somewhat helpful for you. I try now to rescue all the stuff and clean up the mess :)


So long,
Paradox0n