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Mirror cleaned
I did a write up on how my meaning all went from everyone's input and thought I would post it up here. I took some photos as well I'll post after..
So here is my breakdown of the clean. The mirror is now WAY better i'm very happy. I made a list of all the recommendations but ended up evolving my own process.
I did take photos I'll put up but didn't catch every stage.
Cleaning Round 1
- Ran water over the mirror, rocked mirror in water to get waves across surface - visibly removed floating bits
- Ran single finger over surface very gently with few drops of detergent in the water - could see the mist being wiped off even under flowing water
- rinsed with de-ionised (de minteralised was sold out where I went)
- Dried with paper towel dabbing at remainined water droplets (actually touching mirror)
Results were good. 80% of the surface issues were gone. Once I looked over it with a bright light I could still see remaining dots (on the surface I presumed). They looked to be in clouds patterns (I think this is aluminium particles probably from same factory)
Mirror handled the contact I did without any presence of marking.
Cleaning Round 2
- pool of water in mirror, lots of hand soap. Using all fingers ran over the surface more thoroughly with more pressure
- Same rinsing as above
Thought this was perfect until looking at it with multiple bright lights. Still tiny specs remained. I would say this was 95% clean now
Cleaning Round 3 - Hardcore more
- Tried 99.8% IPA on cotton bud direct to tiny specs. With scrubbing some of the specs went but not all. The cotton bud left blue steaks from the IPA I would guess.
- Gave up on cotton bud as the results looked poor and didn't seem very effective
- IPA on microfibre cloth folded to a new edge every minute or so seemed to pick of a decent number of the specks and clear away the blue mist. This evolved to hard scrubbing with the cloth and still no negative effect on the surface
- Finally found the remaining specs that still wouldn't budge with the hard scrubbing would come off if I used my finger directly on the dot and scrubbed.
- I had to shake out the cloth as fibers were coming on the mirror but continually scrubbing and shaking the cloth between wipes and slowly I was able to remove all the fibers (well most).
Eventually removed all but a single dot that I gave up on.
Now 99.99% clean. As a failed perfectionist (joke intended) that's passable
So finally thoughts...
- The mirror can hack waaay more that I expected. That final dot I even used my fingernail on in the end and still no surface damage (and it still defeated me)
- The specks may not be on everyones mirrors but I think they were from being in the same factory that did the aluminium coated and floated through the air and settled on the mirror. So not all mirrors may have it.
- De-ionised water was good but I never actually rinsed my final clean as the buffing was basically dry with IPA evapourating.
- I'm not sure the IPA was essential but it worked
- Fingers are amazing cleaning implements!
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