Problem with elma red

[frog54]

Hi all! 

I have attempted to clean some pieces with elma red but it looks like at has rusted everything (cf picture). What happened ?

Any solution?

[Marc]

I doubt that's rust as the main plate is unlikely to be steel or any other ferrous alloy, it's most likely plated brass. Unless something else has been deposited onto the surface it looks to me like the cleaner has started to strip the plating off the brass. How long did you leave it in the cleaner, and at what temperature?

[frog54]

28 minutes ago, Marc said:

I doubt that's rust as the main plate is unlikely to be steel or any other ferrous alloy, it's most likely plated brass. Unless something else has been deposited onto the surface it looks to me like the cleaner has started to strip the plating off the brass. How long did you leave it in the cleaner, and at what temperature?

Like 8 min at ambiant temperature. Should I just clean what I can with Rubico or is the watch destroyed?

[Nucejoe]

I concur with Marc. 

 And the watch is not destroyed, as jewels aren't relocated or anything , but the base metal starts rusting  without plating. 

I wonder if the solution you have , can/ has damaged the hairspring.

Capstones are still on, should have been removed for a good clean.

 

Edited September 4, 2024 by Nucejoe

[praezis]

And you did dilute the Elma red 1:10 with water?

Edited September 4, 2024 by praezis

[Neverenoughwatches]

2 hours ago, frog54 said:

Hi all! 

I have attempted to clean some pieces with elma red but it looks like at has rusted everything (cf picture). What happened ?

Any solution?

Can you confirm this is rust, are you speculating?  More likely as Marc said and looks like deplated brass, possibly deposited rust from something else. You need to rub it to figure out what it is

[frog54]

23 minutes ago, praezis said:

And you did dilute the Elma red 1:10 with water?

Yes

23 minutes ago, Neverenoughwatches said:

Can you confirm this is rust, are you speculating?  More likely as Marc said and looks like deplated brass, possibly deposited rust from something else. You need to rub it to figure out what it is

It's not rust at the end and it's effectively the brass which has deplated. I have the same on some pieces I have not washed with elma. Is it possible to protect these areas of rust?

[nickelsilver]

Some old movement parts started out with thin plating, and may have been through a number of servicings, potentially losing a bit each time. I've seen many that have lost part or close to all of the plating.

[frog54]

1 hour ago, nickelsilver said:

Some old movement parts started out with thin plating, and may have been through a number of servicings, potentially losing a bit each time. I've seen many that have lost part or close to all of the plating.

Yes it's something from the 40-50s. Good to know

[VWatchie]

8 hours ago, praezis said:

And you did dilute the Elma red 1:10 with water?

Sorry, can't help myself. It's ELMA Red 1:9 

[Neverenoughwatches]

35 minutes ago, VWatchie said:

Sorry, can't help myself. It's ELMA Red 1:9 

Ohhhh H you are a pedantic soul

[RichardHarris123]

I was wondering by volume or mass, either way,   what temperature is considered standard?  Hehe. 

[frog54]

11 hours ago, VWatchie said:

Sorry, can't help myself. It's ELMA Red 1:9 

yes i did

[JohnR725]

13 hours ago, RichardHarris123 said:

what temperature is considered standard?

Typically with any watch cleaning product especially with ammonia room temperature. In other words not elevated temperatures otherwise you can have all sorts of interesting very dramatic problems.

22 hours ago, praezis said:

and you did dilute the Elma red 1:10 with water?

I've copied and pasted something out of the instructions. Did notice it says tapwater and I would really go with the deionized. But you notice for the rinse deionized definitely then ideally followed by their other rinse. As you want to displace the water and have something that isn't going to leave water on your product. The concern I have with tap water can be as a lot of tapwater will have oxygen dissolved in it and having a really clean piece of steel exposed to water and oxygen is not good at all. Then the dilution is extremely important otherwise it's going to be way way too strong.

On 9/4/2024 at 3:23 AM, frog54 said:

Like 8 min at ambiant temperature

Notice up above the reference to time is 3 to 10 minutes I would err on the short side as longer is not necessarily better. The ammonia that makes things nice and bright shiny has a really bad effect if You leave it into long so I would go for shorter rather the longer.

PI_ELMA RED 1zu9_EN.pdf

[tomh207]

Water is inherently rich in oxygen, being 33% of it, the problem is really about tap water. Tap water is never close to pure, depending on where you are in the world you have additives, like fluoride and chlorine as antibacterials. You also have the minerals that have been dissolved into it in the aquifer/substrate it has traveled through. On top of that it may be buffered by the water company to get it as neutral as they can, 7.0PH. Distilled or better deionised water are best for our application. Deinonised water does however leach metal ions from any it touches, though the short exposure we would have it would not be any problem compared to tap water.

 

Tom

[VWatchie]

5 hours ago, tomh207 said:

Distilled or better deionised water are best for our application.

I use something sold under the name "battery water". If I'm not misinformed that is deionised water!? I've never had any problems using this battery water with Elma Red 1:9 and it seems to be a decent cleaner for the money.

Edited September 5, 2024 by VWatchie

[Waggy]

8 hours ago, VWatchie said:

I use something sold under the name "battery water". If I'm not misinformed that is deionised water!? I've never had any problems using this battery water with Elma Red 1:9 and it seems to be a decent cleaner for the money.

It's the dissolved oxygen (O2) in the water that corrodes the iron/steel, the minerals in tap water act to increase the conductive properties of the water (ie making the water into a better electrolyte) allowing the galvanic cell to exist. This is the reason that salt water is far more corrosive than fresh water, the salt turbo charges the corrosion cell. The battery water is deionised to remove minerals (mainly calcium) that would be formed as part of the electrolysis reaction and reduce the performance of the battery. Instead many car batteries have sulphuric acid as the electrolyte, which does not form deposits, but is an excellent electrolyte in solution, and adding deionised water just re-dilutes the solution back to what it was when it came out of the factory. 

I was once on a tour of a fresh water lake in Canada where whey tried to use the standard method of measuring the purity of the water by reading the electrical conductivity. They were puzzled by the fact that both their devices were defective, then (after scratching their head) realised that their instruments were fine, it was the fact that the lake water had no minerals in it, and the water could not conduct electricity.

I would be interested to know how they are treating the battery water, are they removing the minerals, or simply replacing them like they do with water softeners, ie replacing the calcium ion with sodium. If it is the former then all good, as you are making the water a poorer electrolyte, but if it is the latter than you still have minerals in the water and your water is still acting as a good, possibly even better (??) electrolyte, as you would be replacing 1 calcium ion with 2 sodium ions.

This is the limit of my chemistry knowledge, so if there are any chemists out there please feel free to add to this or correct my mistakes.

[PQR]

I can't say if it's good enough for a demanding application, but I get distilled water for free from my home dehumidifier in winter. I pasteurise and bottle it to have a supply all year.

I'm aware, though, that the water has trickled over the vanes of the condenser and will have picked up some particles. Also the collector vessel was supposed to have an anti-fungal coating when it was new. But I live in an area where a single drop of tap water leaves calcium carbonate behind and at least my free distilled water doesn't do that! 

Edited September 6, 2024 by PQR
typo fixed

[RichardHarris123]

We have a condensing clothes dryer, so distilled water from there. 

[rjenkinsgb]

8 hours ago, Waggy said:

I would be interested to know how they are treating the battery water, are they removing the minerals, or simply replacing them like they do with water softeners, ie replacing the calcium ion with sodium.

If it's labelled as Deionised, it should have been produced in a reverse osmosis system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis

If you used more than small quantities of deionised water & don't have a free source, it's worth setting one up.

You can get the parts from various suppliers on ebay. It's basically some cartridge filters to keep particulates and chlorine out of the RO element, the RO unit itself & some tubing.  

A basic system with sealed, disposable filters is around £40 or one with replaceable cartridges (so cheaper in the long term) around £80.

All the filter housings etc. are cheap enough separately, so you can build one from scratch or add better pre-filtering if you live in a hard water area, so the RO membrane lasts longer. I built one some years ago when I was using quite a lot & the stuff was £4 per gallon to buy.

(Some kits also have a mineralisation adding stage after the RO unit, to give purified drinking water some flavour.. Not needed for cleaning or chemistry uses!)

Examples:

 

[HectorLooi]

Water purification is a subject that even some manufacturers don't understand.

About 20 years ago, I was called in to investigate why instruments coming out of a top-of-the-line Swiss vacuum autoclave were coming out with rust.

I discovered that the autoclave was supplied with a "deionization unit" that uses ion exchange resin technology. This is an antiquated technology that uses a resin that binds ions like calcium and magnesium and REPLACES it with sodium ions. It is basically a water softener and not a deionizer.

I had a heated argument with the manufacturer as they had absolutely no idea of what they were doing. I pulled out a TDS meter and showed them that the water coming out of their deionuzer was not free of ions. And still they could not understand.

Their conclusion was that the water in Singapore is of such low quality that it is unsuitable for use with their autoclave. They claim they have no such problem with Swiss Alpine water.

I advised my client to tell them to go home and sell only in Switzerland. 

[nevenbekriev]

On 9/6/2024 at 7:14 PM, HectorLooi said:

Water purification is a subject that even some manufacturers don't understand.

About 20 years ago, I was called in to investigate why instruments coming out of a top-of-the-line Swiss vacuum autoclave were coming out with rust.

I discovered that the autoclave was supplied with a "deionization unit" that uses ion exchange resin technology. This is an antiquated technology that uses a resin that binds ions like calcium and magnesium and REPLACES it with sodium ions. It is basically a water softener and not a deionizer.

I had a heated argument with the manufacturer as they had absolutely no idea of what they were doing. I pulled out a TDS meter and showed them that the water coming out of their deionuzer was not free of ions. And still they could not understand.

Their conclusion was that the water in Singapore is of such low quality that it is unsuitable for use with their autoclave. They claim they have no such problem with Swiss Alpine water.

I advised my client to tell them to go home and sell only in Switzerland. 

Hi Hector,

I have serviced for several years (20 years ago) the central sterile bases in two big hospitals  in my city and several smaller in near locations. The sterilizers were Swiss made, by Shearer. They were big, automated, with huge vapor generators. All of them used reverse osmosis and then resin softeners (catjonit resins), washed with salt (NaCl). There were smaller sterilizers in the hospital compartments, that were using only small resin softeners, no reverse osmosis. I assure that our water here is very hard (25 french units and more). The only instruments that were sometimes getting rusty were made in India or Pakistan. Others like German or even Russian never had problems.

[HectorLooi]

Reverse osmosis was a game changer in water purification. Before RO filters, I had water distillers in my clinic, which were like running all day, just to produce enough water for the clinic. It used to heat up the whole sterilization room and the electrical bills were phenomenal. 

I helped 3M trial the use of direct water mains to RO water supply to dental chair units. RO filters provide bacteria free and almost distilled quality water at a fraction of the cost and at an incredible flow rate.

The RO water actually dissolved the mineral buildup in the plumbing of my dental chair until the brass fittings looked brand new internally.

[RichardHarris123]

I remember RO from my university days and after a while stating, it's just a fine filter then "