On Wednesday, March 4, 2015 at 6:04:40 PM UTC-5, Jon Danniken wrote:
I have a bucket of fasteners that I need to degrease, which may possibly
be an ongoing project (we'll see). If I only had a few I'd just use a
parts brush and some gaso^h^h^h^h, cough, I mean, um, kerosene, but
I'm looking for something non solvent-based.

Is automatic dishwasher powder still a viable option for this? Maybe TSP?

I'm not quite at the stage where a hot tub of lye is called for.

Thanks for suggestions,

Jon

I used to have in my shop, the all-time nastiest degreaser. It was a 5-gallon bucket 1/2 full of methylene chloride (like in paint stripper), with almost 1/2 a bucket of water floating on top, and a thin layer of oil on top of that, to keep the water from evaporating.

You could dip the dirtiest, greasy-est, ugliest stuff in it, and it would come out so clean that surface rust would begin almost immediately.

I go this at a local auto parts store, it was sold as carb cleaner. I disposed of it (after years of use) at a hazardous waste disposal "event." I was pretty nervous driving there with the covered but unsealed bucket in my trunk.

Nasty stuff, that was, but it sure did get parts clean.

In the past (25+ years ago), I had some "as seen on TV" stuff called "Citrus Miracle." This was an orange oil based stuff, you could dilute it like 100:1 and use it as a general purpose cleaner. Undiluted, it was formidable. It would clean flux off circuit boards better than anything else I've used, short of a vapor degreaser. Of course, the company that sold it disappeared before I could get more, and I've never seen anything quite like it since.. It was way more concentrated and more viscous than stuff I see in stores. I'd love to get some more of that, if anyone knows where to look.