Best way to clean motors?

[NEKTREG]

Any experience with ultrasonic baths?

[Marco Gilardetti]

Not really, but I know by experience that the owners of ultrasonic washing machines tend to clean objects that are already "clean" by common standards, i.e. if you give them a very dirty record they will refuse to clean it as it would cloud the washing bath of the ultrasonic washing machine. So I can hardly figure anyone accepting a gramophone motor full of oils, greases, graphite powders and so on.

In general, however, there is no need to clean a gramophone motor to such extent as an ultrasonic washer would do. It just needs to be "clean enough".

[gramophone-georg]

Any experience with ultrasonic baths?

I have a couple large ultrasonic cleaners (a 10l and a 16l unit) and I use them for carburetors, fuel injectors, mechanical injection pump parts, diesel injection pump parts, etc., as well as gramophone motors. They work great with a combo of distilled water and citrus cleaner. I wouldn't put a fiber gear in one though. Seems they make an attachment for records. I haven't gotten that far yet but I likely will one day. I will get another cleaner to use only for those, though.

[rw101]

I have just cleaned a couple of springs from an HMV motor. I disassembled the whole thing, scraped away the congealed old grease as much as possible, all as recommended above. The solvent I used to get rid of the rest was a little vegetable oil, which seemed to do the trick for most, with a little fine steel wool, pressing gently.

[LaoChe85]

I did end up servicing this motor but as you can tell from how late this update is, I did it recently. Business led me to leave it until now but I can say that white spirit worked okay and I managed to get the majority of the grease of the two springs. The Moly grease I bought also worked a treat and it was from Halfords in the UK if anyone wants to take a look.

However, I have bought some diesel for next time because the white spirit was just not strong enough and the cleaning process just took too long. I spent close to about 2 full days spread out over a week just getting the grease off the springs. So I think if your springs were not as dirty as mine with the huge amount of hardened grease I had, it would be much less tedious but if they were any near as gunged up as mine then I would suggest using something A LOT stronger.

[CarlosV]

Hahaha, I have bought some moly grease for it and plan to use that + sewing machine oil for the governor etc. For solvents, I have bought white spirit firstly just to see if it works enough. If that doesn't work I'll move onto paraffin/kerosene. Thanks for all the suggestions and tips

White spirit will work fine, but before applying it scrape the hardened grease with a wooden spatula. It will ease the work: most of the hardened grease will come off with the mechanical action, and the thinner will take care of the remains.