Fingerprints on Glass and Aluminum

Q. How do you clean fingerprints on glass and aluminum?

A. Fingerprints on bare aluminum that has been polished or abraided in a way that damages the protective oxide layer will potentially etch the aluminum and leave a hard to remove fingerprint. The same thing happens with lime-soda glass (window glass, as distinguished from the more robust borosilicate glass found in lab glassware) where a fingerprint can eat into the glass and etch in a hard to remove fingerprint.

To clean an etched fingerprint off of aluminum generally requires an abrasive scrub with something like a green scotchbrite pad, steel wool or some such. If this is a polished aluminum surface that cannot be abrasive scrubbed, then you have to use hazardous aluminum cleaners (for industrial scale cleaning look for Magic Aluminum Cleaner from ABC Compounding 800-795-2222 and for small scale use, buy Mag Wheel Rim cleaner products from an automotive supply store.)

On glass, you can sometimes use a light etching cleaner like Detojet at moderate temperature (circa 120 deg F) to etch out the fingerprint without frosting the glass. If you go too hot and too long with Detojet on window glass, you can frost it.

With conveyorized cleaning of glass panels with Detojet, you can get shadows of the conveyor belt etched in to the glass if you clean too hot – engineers trying to speed up a conveyor belt to get more thruput sometimes raise the temperature and start etching the glass – note if you speed up the conveyor belt enough sometimes you can get away with this, but it is a tricky balancing act.

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