Home / Ultrasonic Cleaning
Clean it. Don’t replace it.
We run a 42″ × 36″ × 36″ ultrasonic tank in house. It reaches the inside of parts nobody can reach with a brush (heat exchangers, aftercooler cores, injectors, turbo components) without abrasives and without eating the metal. And it’s big enough to take the whole part instead of what fits in a bucket.
What it actually fixes
Nobody calls asking for ultrasonic cleaning.
They call because the engine runs hot, or it isn’t making the power it used to. This is often the answer, and it’s usually the cheapest one on the table.
Running hot at cruise
Temperature creeps up the longer you run. A heat exchanger or aftercooler that looks fine from outside can be half blocked internally with scale and salt.
Lost power that came on slowly
Nobody notices 8% a season. Restricted air and coolant passages choke an engine gradually enough that owners adapt to it.
Black smoke or high EGT
Carboned-up injectors and a fouled aftercooler both show up the same way at the stack.
An expensive part you’d rather not replace
A heat exchanger core, an aftercooler, a set of injectors. Cleaning one properly costs a fraction of buying one.
Into the tank
If it has passages you can’t see down, it’s a candidate.
- Heat exchangers & end caps
- Aftercooler & intercooler cores
- Oil coolers
- Injectors & nozzles
- Turbocharger components
- Cylinder heads
- Raw water pump housings
- Throttle bodies & carburetors
- Valve train & small hardware
- Transmission & gear components
Bring us the part or bring us the boat. If it’s something we haven’t put through before, tell us what it’s made of and we’ll tell you straight whether it’s worth trying.
Two different coolers: what typically comes in, and what goes back out.
The alternatives
Four ways to deal with a fouled cooler.
Three of them we’ve watched cost owners money. Here’s the honest comparison.
By hand
Rodding and brushing only reaches what a rod can reach. Everything past the first bend stays exactly as it was, which is usually where the restriction is.
Acid dip
Aggressive enough to work, and aggressive enough to attack the base metal, solder joints and gasket surfaces while it does. Hard to control, easy to overdo.
Buy a new one
Always works. Costs the most, and on older or larger engines the part may be weeks out or no longer made at all.
Ultrasonic
Cavitation reaches every internal passage the solution touches: around bends, through tube stacks, into blind galleries, without abrasives and without attacking the metal.
Trade work
Other yards send us parts.
Most shops don’t have a tank, so a fouled cooler becomes a new cooler on the customer’s invoice. If you’re a yard, a marina or another shop and you’d rather hand the owner a cleaned part and a smaller bill, we’ll take the work.
Our tank is 42″ long, so we can take parts most benchtop units can’t: full bundles and cores, not just injectors. Same goes for fleet and commercial operators running the same part across several boats.
Not sure what you need yet?
Tell us the boat and what it’s doing. We’ll tell you straight whether it’s a service, a repair, or time to repower.