2 of 10

Write now Article Tools

Cleaning with natural products is good for your wallet, good for the environment and usually great for whatever it is you're cleaning. It leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling, safe in the knowledge that you aren't doing any harm right? Wrong, well sometimes anyway.

Everything is a chemical of some sort. The difference that we're looking at here is that we choose to use a naturally occurring chemical, rather than something that we purchase that may contain substances that are or could be harmful to us or the environment.

When we look at cleaning metals such as copper and brass we need to understand what they are so that we do good things to them rather than bad. The fancy (or scientific if you will) name for copper and copper based alloys is "cupreous metal". In layman's terms this means that any metal that is copper or an alloy that is mostly copper is called cupreous. Brass is a mixture of copper, zinc and sometimes lead.

This information may sound boring, but before you start cleaning you really need to know it. The fact that there's zinc in brass means you need to be careful how much salt you use in your cleaning. Anyone that's owned a boat kept on a mooring knows just how much salt likes zinc. It loves it, gobbles it up at a rate of knots and will leave all your other metal bits alone in its zeal to get to the zinc.

Armed with this knowledge we can now begin. Any Internet search will tell you that the best things to use are lemon juice or vinegar with salt, or worcestershire or tomato sauce (ketchup). The sauces work because the main ingredient in both is vinegar. This means that we really come back to the lemon juice or vinegar and salt.

Now, the salt is generally used because it's abrasive. Abrasive's are good for cleaning metal. Salt is a nice, natural abrasive. When using it with brass it's important to wash it off with fresh, clean water as soon as possible after we've done the cleaning. If we don't it will continue to eat away at the brass and eventually remove any engravings, fine lines and bits of character on the piece that we probably want to preserve. Salt is greedy.

The most simple way to clean both types of metal is to cut a lemon in half, dip it in salt, rub over the article until the muck is obviously moving, then rinse in clean, fresh water and dry with a soft, non abrasive, cloth. A solution of 1 teaspoon of salt dissolved in a cup of white vinegar will work as well.

Of course, these methods won't work if your copper or brass item has been laminated.

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Cleaning brass and copper without chemicals?
We want to hear your view. Write now!