{"id":13,"date":"2014-03-28T15:44:14","date_gmt":"2014-03-28T15:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.michelelukowski.com\/?p=13"},"modified":"2020-01-12T16:40:01","modified_gmt":"2020-01-12T16:40:01","slug":"metalsmith-secret-cleaning-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"Metalsmith Secret Cleaning Product"},"content":{"rendered":"

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An in-between step that most metalsmiths skip over in their tutorials and descriptions is cleaning. Cleaning a piece (before or after soldering, during chasing and repousse to remove burnt pitch, before raising or planishing, etc) is pretty important. A lot of people use a “pickle” solution (usually some brand like Sparex, or a homemade recipe) to clean things. This involves waiting, or sometimes bad fumes if you use your pickle hot (which speeds up the pickle process). When doing chasing and repousse, I really don’t want to use my pickle for removing pitch residue anyway, because it makes a gooey glop build up in the solution.<\/p>\n

Most of the time, I leave my pickle pot (a crock pot from Goodwill) off.  For the in-between cleaning steps I am a fan of the off-the-shelf cleaning product i get from the grocery store, Bar Keeper’s friend. (I am not compensated by the company and am in no way affiliated).<\/p>\n

This handy cleanser removes oxidation and pitch residue easily with either a toothbrush or wire brush, and takes just a minute or two. It works great on copper and silver both. I did a little research to find that the magic ingredient is oxalic acid, which occurs naturally in foods like rhubarb and spinach.<\/p>\n

It does a great job of cleaning my kitchen pots, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An in-between step that most metalsmiths skip over in their tutorials and descriptions is cleaning. Cleaning a piece (before or after soldering, during chasing and repousse to remove burnt pitch, before raising or planishing, etc) is pretty important. A lot of people use a “pickle” solution (usually some brand like Sparex, or a homemade recipe)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelelukowski.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}