Introduction:
The Pikal® name in Japan for nearly 100 years has been synonymous with the
finest metal cleaning and polishing products in the world. They have been
the preferred products for collectors of ancient metal objects, museum
curators worldwide, and also those who are charged with the operation and
maintenance of scientific instruments that operate under high vacuum
conditions. In all cases, metal surfaces must be kept clean while at the
same time, avoiding abrasive damage to the surface during the cleaning
process.
All three Pikal polishing products derive from the original Pikal formulations that were created nearly 100 years ago when it was discovered that a carefully formulated mixture of aluminum oxide powder, kerosene, certain fatty acids with some ammonia water result in a near "perfect" cleaning and polishing system.
How these products differ:
Deciding which is for you can at first seem confusing. But it really is not.
For one thing, the product in the oval can called Pikal Paste and the
product in the tube called Pikal Care are really the same abrasive system
but with the paste being higher in solids. The percent solids of the Pikal
Care is slightly lower and therefore also, slightly lower in viscosity and
more "wet" so that it can flow and be squeezed out of a tube. One of the
perceived disadvantages of the Pikal Paste is that it might, with time tend
to dry out but we ourselves have found that to not be the case, even for a
can of Pikal paste that was over twenty years old.
Pikal Polish is a liquid and is used primarily for cleaning dried up "gunk" from a metal surface. This is the preferred Pikal product for those cleaning and polishing antique swords. The alumina polishing grit is a smaller particle size than what is used in Pikal Paste and Pikal Care and therefore will be less abrasive to a metal surface. This product is used "wet" (as opposed to dry) resulting in even less abrasion.
Applications:
We first became aware of these outstanding products for applications for
cleaning delicate parts of high vacuum systems, and electron microscopes and
other types of electron optical instrumentation. Nothing else really seemed
to work as well, and the PIKAL paste product had outstanding cleaning
properties, and yet, did not cause extraordinary abrasion to a delicate high
precision surface, involving instruments sometimes costing more than $1,000,000.
All of these PIKAL products have wide applications in automotive, especially for the antique automobile restoration industry. The PIKAL paste is widely used in commercial kitchens for polishing all stainless steel surfaces and also, polishing silver ware. We advise against using the PIKAL products on any kind of precious metal stones since the abrasive grid could be harder than the stone itself, causing damage. The PIKAL Polish product can be used on glass surfaces without damaging the substrate glass.
Use caution!
These products should be used with great caution on "soft metal" surfaces
such as aluminum and/or anodized aluminum and most plastic surfaces.
Available products:
