[Josh7975]

Just ordered some pipeshield from roto.

I read as much as I could here about pipe shield and wanted to make sure I got the steps correct:

1. Mix pipe shield (1 part) and water (4 parts)
2. soak 24 hours
3. scrub with tooth brush
4. dry on towel?

Also, I'll be cleaning some ASM emerald princess chips. Like others I've seen, mine have some staining/yellowing/even a little molding around the edges of the inlay. The staining appears to be in the paper beneath the inlay, not in the transparent plastic inlay itself.

1. Any way to bleach or clean these stains?
2. The presence of the stains indicates that the inlay seal is not waterproof, which means the pipeshield might get under there into the inlay. Will this be a problem?

Thanks much.

[JoseRijo]

No responses, yet?

I've never cleaned ASMs before, but your Pipe Shield recipe is correct. Normally, you can let them soak even longer than 24 hours (like, 3-4 days).

The best advice I can give you is to try it out on a couple of your worst chips and see what happens. Clean water by itself usually doesn't affect clay chips, and Pipe Shield is as gentle as it gets.

[Josh7975]

Thanks Jose. I've done a couple small batches with decent results.

I haven't been to Cambridge in a few years, but that used to be my old stomping grounds... is Charlie's still around, or have they finally been bought out by yet another Japanese fusion type restaurant?

I know the pipe shield thing is old news, so I don't know if there is interest in this, but I'll try to keep a list of different chips and results. So far, my first batch was 1-to-4, 24 hours, flipped the chips about halfway through, rinsed and brushed chips in warm water with Dawn dish detergent. Second batch got slightly better results: 1-to-1, just warm water rinse/brush with no detergent. I saved the 1-1 mix and right now I am trying to reuse it with more chips. Here are the chips:

ASM Emerald Princess: Bleached out! Chips went from a deeper pinkish maroon (around Twizzler color in darkness) to, in some cases, almost white (pink Smarties or even paler). Of the 10 chips I cleaned, the yellow edge spot became the darkest color on the chips for about half of them-- that's how much the pink and orange faded. Color is slowly returning... to maybe around strawberry Starburst. I'm still reluctant to rub laxative on my chips but I may have to do it for these. Don't know if the bleaching has to do with the specific pigments used in these chips or if bleaching would happen with any soaking, not just in pipe shield. Minimal to no improvement to the inlay stains, no pipe shield seems to have gotten under the inlay. Chip faces look very clean. Rolling edges (is that the correct term?) are still darker and dirty. So these chips will look good in play, but not in the rack.

St. Jo $25 primary: Nice job removing standard dirt. Light drying. Cancellation hotstamps are significantly loosened. I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to completely remove them. Pretty much comparable results to the 5-minute soak and scrub method with Oxi.

Random soiled chips: Nice results with President Biloxis, again, about the same as Oxi. Some of the stains on these come from mud and rust I think, and the rust stains are pretty much unaffected. Some other gross Paulsons that have been caked in mud and casino sludge-- OK results, probably need to soak much longer to get everything out of the tight parts of the mold.