> I bought a gun plastic cleaning brush and rod as Walt suggested, however
> the rod is not flexible enough to get around the piping and into all the
> tubes.
Geoff,
I have found that the brush they sell for cleaning coffee percolators works
just fine for my Maisie! It is a flexible steel wire with interspersed white
plastic bristles. It doesn't damage the soft aluminum vertical tube in a
coffee percolator, si it shouldn't bother a copper tube! It will wiggle
around all sorts of obstructions, like the superheater header and branch
pipes. For anything larger than Maisie, you might want to add an extension
to the twisted wire handle. But with a combustion chamber on Maisie, it
reaches the entire length of the fire tubes quite well, and can even then be
used to brush off the vertical circulation tubes of the Nicholson Thermic
Syphon. The C&S mogul, being a Butane fired beastie, I haven't bothered to
brush it's tubes ! But as a coffee percolator usually has about .250" inside
diam. tubes, it should work on our sizes of copper boiler tubes!
Keith
P.S. I found the gun cleaning brushes to be a little stiff and they did mark
the copper. They are brass or bronze bristles, but are made to get rid of
burnt on crud from a steel surface. A rather hard surface if the barrel is
for a modern arm capapble of firing jacketed ammo! it's purpose then is to
remove the copper fouling in the steel barrle! So, if it will remove copper
from a barrel, it will remove copper from your tube, I'd think! Steel
boilers will be unaffected by this, but I sure wouldn't use a gun cleaning
brush in a copper boiler tube, if it were me!
Keith
