I use a salad spinner, warm/hot water and Lundmark faux-TSP. Two minute spin. Rinse, lay out. I do about 200 per cycle. If any of them need extra attention, I set them aside and use an old toothbrush/toothpaste, but the spinner gets 98.5% of them clean.
I accidentally ordered three racks of *uncleaned* used Jack Cincy $1s (THC mold), instead of cleaned ones. Having just put them twice through the spinner with Lundmark, thought I’d share the results.
(1) How they arrived: Absolutely filthy
(2) Two-minute agitated baths in the salad spinner for each rack: 8 cups hot but not scalding water and 1.5 tablespoons of Lundmark faux-TSP. Every 20 pulls or so, I open the spinner and stir the chips with a spoon to avoid chips sticking together and not getting fully covered. Note: I also added a drop of dishwashing liquid, Meyers Clean Day to each batch... Here is the water after two minutes:
Disgusting, right? I don’t know why it looks so pink. Maybe from contact with red $5s? Tomato sauce from people who eat pizza at the table? I dunno
(3) Result after the first 2-minute bath: Not ultrasound-clean, but much improved:
(4) Second 2-minute bath, all three racks at once, sightly higher concentration (2 tablespoons in 8 hot but not scalding cups of water). Here is what the water looked like afterward... You can see that not much more came off, but there is still a slight pinkish-orange haze in the water:
(5) Sample after the second bath:
So: These are much, much cleaner than before. Many do show some light smudging still... I’ll probably pick out maybe 10% of the worst ones for light hand-cleaning with toothpaste and a toothbrush. They would definitely require deep hand-cleaning and/or ultrasound treatment to get really bright. If I was cleaning these to showcase them, as opposed to actual use, I would go a lot deeper.
But just to prep/update chips which are in play regularly, I think the TSP spinner method is an amazingly quick and easy method. It took me maybe 20-25 minutes to do the three racks, and most of that was busywork of measuring, rinsing, etc., with only 8 minutes actual agitation.
Note: In retrospect, I wish I had set some of these aside to just soak with Lundmark. It’s possible the spinner isn't really doing much of the work. But I believe it does help.
Final pic of these drying...
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