pace resistance tools maintence

[coppercone2]

Does anyone know if there are any coatings or anything like that which should be used with pace resistance tools (pulse) tweezers, lap-flo or wire strippers?

I got some old tips for these, and I used the dremel type flexible abrasive plastic radial disks up to 2500 grit to polish them (good way to get high polish without a mess) and then clean them in a ultrasonic cleaner, because they were very loaded with char. I tried them out afterwards and they appear to work well afterwards for removing SMD parts, before there was a problem with thermal transfer.

But, I am wondering if there is any kind of coating that is required for these? They don't appear to tin, and the manual says nothing about it, so I kind of assume they are just supposed to be as clean as possible. Some kind of passivation dip ? Not sure what they are made out of. I assume someone was over loading them running red hot before.

[Shock]

They aren't tinned looking at the photos and assuming nickel would tin with solder under the right conditions, so perhaps steel/stainless steel would be a good guess.

[coppercone2]

So if its stainless steel do you need to do anything if its been abrasively polished? Everything I read about it says it gets rid of stuff after machining, but I got it to a very high shine presumably with nylon and some kind of oxide

Maybe soft barkeepers friend? It has oxalic and citric acid in it and it makes shiny stainless look good without scratching it (not the powder, its a liquid).


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Passivation is a post-fabrication process that is performed after grinding, welding, cutting and other machining operations that manipulate stainless steel. Under ideal conditions, stainless steel naturally resists corrosion, which might suggest that passivating would be unnecessary.
https://www.besttechnologyinc.com/passivation-systems/what-is-passivation/

So it seems that if I abrasively cleaned the surface, it would benefit from some kind of passivation, if nylon abrasive brushes can be linked to grinding

https://www.besttechnologyinc.com/passivation-systems/citrisurf-citric-acid-passivation-solution/

So I will try citric acid passivization with the ultrasonic as mentioned by the first article. I think what it whats is when you clean it you get the actual stainless steel mixture , but you really just want the chrome without the iron, so you wanna eat the iron away from the surface so you are left with a very thin layer of chrome that oxides like aluminum to protect it, so no matter how gentle the polishing is, you are changing the surface composition to be like the core.

Unless its like pure chrome or something? but it seems like a safe bet to try this, they are replacable anyway. \


I got the citrisafe passivization cleaner, I will try it on the parts that I made, maybe its the key for restoring soldering iron barrels which seem to tarnish way quicker then normal after polishing, perhaps it just needs an actual passivization processes rather then ;'it looks great why bother' .

[coppercone2]

I repolished the soldering iron shaft using the buffs to 2000 grit to a nice shine, but afterwards I cleaned it from oils and then I did a 15 minute soak in citrisurf. I used the soldering iron today to do heavy soldering at high temp way past its normal operating range at 900F to do some brass tubes, and the discoloration is minimal, considering the usual effects of such abuse.

So it looks like if you use passivation solution on the parts after polishing it does greatly reduce the blackening that makes cleaning soldering irons seem futile. I expect that if you use it at normal temperatures it will last a long time, prior to this I had a soot rod in 5 minutes.