Thanks Keith, Gary and Phil, Now to hunt for the coffee perculator tube cleanig brushhes. It is my Maisie I am having difficulty with so based on your experience, Keith, looks as tho I'll find a fix for mine Thanks. Incidentally, the OS brush is flexible twisted meta but the brush is too large for the Maisie tubes
Geoff.. 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 > >
