Got approached Sunday late, about 4:30 to come clean some large pieces of paving equipment that had been shipped in for a show from Sweden. Girl who contacted me said just had some travel dust from being in transit on ship and by road. Just needed rinsing off. It was about 5 large pieces and about 10 smaller pieces. I kind of wondered when they jumped all over what I thought was a pretty strong price for something that shouldn’t have taken a couple of hours. Several of these pieces were massive, talking 15-20 ft tall and size of good sized den and sell for $550k. But just dust right.
So get there around 6pm, thinking I had about 90 min till it gets dark and the light dust is some serious grease in a few places, but the kicker were these machines were 90% coated with Cosmoline to protect them from the salt air in transit. The cosmoline is supposed to break down with 125 deg heat. That’s BS. Took 175 deg to really get most of it off. Using pressure got more of it off, but left streaks kind of like with wood. But still wasn’t completely gone. Tried EBC, DJ and some hydroxide and still no help. Concentrated Purple Purple did do a number on the grease though. Went back a 2nd night with a gal of mineral spirits and a spray bottle and they turned out amazing. Just lightly sprayed the mineral spirits on it and even spots that I couldn’t get off with 3000+psi and 175 heat, let dwell for about 2 minutes and it wiped right off. The company was ecstatic. Ended up with about 3.5 hours in project. Company gave me a $300 tip. Plus I’m a lot more knowledgeable about cleaning cosmoline.
Great company, good people and incredible equipment. They’re priced about 20% higher than most their competitors but are 40% more efficient. Super hi-tech. Some of their equipment can be run remotely. That feeder I’m showing in the pic can hold 21 tons of hot asphalt and can feed dual spreaders. In the pic, it’s actually lowered about 3’. the top of the cab electronically raises up. Here’s a video of the thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaaU_oYxNTo
Ahhh cosmoline , amazing stuff for shipping g and storage, but a pain in the ■■■ to remove. We started cheating and just started dumping full rifles into heated parts washers over night, then just burning off the contaminated mineral spirits from the parts washers. Then you could just give the rifles a bore swab and some clp and you were good to go!
Nothing quite like scraping cosmoline off weapons. One dude thought he would soak it in clp and be ok. Wrong. It turned tacky and tar like and damn near locked the weapon up
We had a SAW, that got packed full of the stuff was a nightmare to remove. We ended up wrapping it in tons of news paper and black plastic bags and setting it on top of a guard tower in Baghdad, the sun melted it out of all the nooks and crannies and we just kept replacing the paper and bags till 90 percent of it was gone, then cleaned the rest.
What I really wanted was one of those steam units! We had one for disinfecting the aid station but they would have waterboarded me with sewage if ide snuck it out of the Aid station.
I hadn’t even thought of it in 25 years probably but the not so fond memories came back quick. I remember we’d use anything we could get our hands on, kerosene, gas, and of course trying to melt it off with a zippo, lol.
Man, the stuff I have learned from you is astounding (videos and posts), you always have something different. I appreciate the fact that not only do you post how you did it right, but what went wrong. Heck, if I never do this professionally I will absolutely have a better outcome for my friends and families houses. Although I must add that I couldn’t watch the entirety of the 1hr+ video of cleaning a drive (had to fast forward a little). Going perpendicular never occurred to me, water flow seemed common sense, grooving the edge was nice, the sump pump was something I hadn’t considered, rinsing based off sun and heat made pure sense, but little things like turning surface cleaner into hose (hose management)…well priceless.
All the ex military here know that you can learn a ton from watching someone do something wrong, or someone telling you how they did something wrong. Guys taking their weapons into the showers to clean them, then not oiling them…loI.
