Ultrasonic Cleaner Advise

Hi Gent's, I work full time as a gunsmith and do a lot of work on older rifles rebarrelling and rebuilding. I was thinking about getting a good ultrasonic cleaner to enable me to clean actions and assemblies before starting work on them and was wondering whether the guys have got them are finding them a valuable addition to the shop?
I thought they may be good for cleaning modern trigger assemblies without disassembly and other sub-assemblies that need cleaning but don't benefit from disassembly?
Also thought they could do a good job of cleaning up the filthy internals of stripped bolt bodies, action threads, and cut down on use of solvents.
The unit I'm looking at is around $1500 so I don't want to spend the dough if I'm kidding myself on the capabilities.
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
Cheers
Tom

I've used them for many things in machine rebuilding but not gunsmithing. Only thing I can suggest is to make sure you're getting a low frequency one. I'm not completely sure how low they go, but a 40K HZ unit is going to work better for this then say an 80K HZ unit. The lower the frequency the better for heavier soiled cleaning. High frequency units I believe are used more on circuit boards and things like that.

I bought a low priced heated ultrasonic cleaner big enough for 1911's. For my Ruger Mk III I take the grips off and run it with Ed's Red at about 170 degrees for 1/2 hour. So far that's all the cleaning I've done with that pistol in thousands of rounds. The Ed's I mixed up has lanolin in it which is incredibly slippery and corrosion resistant. I've used it to clean filthy antique pistols as well

I have owned and used numerous ones in the machine shop, cleaning up plastic injection molds, and with the correct cleaner they do an amazing job. One warning though, make sure you dry and oil everything because I have seen steel items cleaned in these go totally rusty if something wasn't done fairly quickly. Overnite was WAY too long to wait for rust inhibitor of some sort. Bought my last one used off of eBay and it was a brute, you could clean an engine block with it. Cost me about $1000 to buy it but almost that much again for shipping.

Thanks gents, I bought the unit and it’s working perfectly as hoped. I ran several filthy stripped actions and parts through the other day and it made inspection prior to barrelling very easy. Also nice to have all the threads clean and all pockets free of filth.
I had to rust blue a Ross mk111 magazine assembled and I was great for cleaning it after of the blazing media and residue.
No doubt I’ll use it all the time.

tbonesmith said:

...I thought they may be good for cleaning modern trigger assemblies without disassembly and other sub-assemblies that need cleaning but don't benefit from disassembly?...

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The one thing I can add is be VERY CAREFUL what kind of cleaner you run when doing trigger assy's. A lot of them are aluminum. I put a Belgian Browning BAR trigger group into my US unit and ran it for 4 minutes and it completely stripped the color out of the anodized aluminum. I was using LA Awesome Orange from the dollar store and it totally stripped it! Stuff works great for steel but is hard on aluminum and it also dulls Mossberg 500 plastic ones. Had to find a local anodize company and hit my wallet to make it right. The last one I ran was a 742 Rem and I put it in a mason jar with water and Dawn detergent and threw that in the tank. Ran it for a couple cycles at 15 min each. Cleaned up real good and didn't wreck the alloy part. Where I live it is fairly hot and dry most of the year, so I blow them out with air after running under hot water and just set them out in the sun for an hour or so.
Simple Green makes an aircraft grade cleaner that is supposed to be aluminum friendly.

I used a big ultrasonic cleaner using caustic sodium hydroxide at usually 160F. caustic if get on skin will feel slippery cause it is dissolving your skin. it will dissolve your eyeballs too.
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caustic will not cause rust but if water rinse you need to dry and put rust preventative on soon. caustic dissolves oil, grease, wax (organic matter)and clean steel especially wet with water will rust extremely fast
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also saw aluminum lug electric wire connectors corrode and over heat and electrical tape start on fire one day. just saying caustic tends to damage stuff near the cleaner. exterior pipe hose I would not trust rubber hoses. cleaner I used had flexible stainless hose. just saying if you got a leak it can be a very serious problem. if I remember it takes 100 gallons of water with 1 gallon of caustic to get ph to 10 or less. takes a lot of water to make just a little caustic not as dangerous
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also hot caustic dissolves aluminum. you put aluminum part in and often can see bubbles as it is being eaten or dissolved. bubbles probably hydrogen which is a explosive gas