Not sure if it is of any use but still: Pitambari powder…
I had some remains from cleaning old copper pots and cups (decoration items).
It is sold in Asian grocery stores, mainly the Indian ones, to clean and ‘polish’ soft metal things like doing the dishes with not much extra work.
I gave it a shot after I created a bad mess on my bed when trying to print with ‘stupid’ settings and not paying attention to the print…
Forgot to change the parameters for the bed and so I literally baked the PLA onto it.
Placed in the freezer to get the print off but the remains of the first layers and some glue did not budge.
Put some of the powder on a sponge, worked into the surface with a bit of water and let it sit for about half an hour.
Everything came off with ease and it seems the stuff has a build in rinse aid of sorts.
I think I will keep using it after a few rolls went through in order to check if it was just coincidence or if the stuff really works better than soap and IPA to get rid of bad stuff on the bed.
As for the IPA hype…
I worked in a company building optical sensors for a few years and our first choice was IPA when it came to cleaning, DRY IPA as they labelled it with the lowest possible water content.
Due to the costs we one day decided to check if plain ethanol work be good enough.
Through that we learned about the differences when a company just states industrial ethanol, methylated spirit or used just a bittering agent.
Let’s just say things come out of a still in a similar quality to what you had in the wash…
In order:
Lab grade ethanol costs a fortune but is literally pure alcohol in drinking quality with no taste or anything.
Usually available in 92 to 95% concentrations.
Leaves no residue whatsoever, not even on optical glass and such.
Methylated spirit, is actual methanol was added is pretty much on par here but it can have bad effects on certain plastics - like acrylic starting to develop fine cracks or going dull if used too often or too long.
In most cases though methanol is just not removed from the distilled product and a bittering agent is added.
Depending on the grade and quality this can be a problem on optical glass, your windows or such as it can leave a slight haze behind - can be polished off though.
So what IS the big difference between Ethanol and Isopropanol?
The first you can drink, the later will kill you if you drink a bit too much.
But IPA is a ‘better’ solvent than Ethanol.
That is in terms of it’s polarity and ability to bond with other chemicals.
In most cases we encounter in the FDM world we won’t really need to use IPA, Ethanol will do just fine…
For cleaning the mechanical parts though IPA is still best, not just because it can take away more grease than Ethanol…
I still have about 2 litres of good quality IPA here that I use for soxhlet extractions, so it doesn’t really get used up much.
But I can’t really remember the last time I used it on my bed intentionally…