treblemaker

Hi all, just wanted to warn you about something: someone down the road may tell you that it's an amaxingly effective cleaner to soak your mouthpiece in Alka Seltzer. This is completely WRONG. Don't do it. My friend did, and it looked great for about ten hours after she did it--until the coating of the mouthpiece completely dissolved, and now it looks totally beat up. Just to warn you...

rowuk

I would be interested to hear what "coating" was on the mouthpiece that came off. Silver or goldplate would not be affected by the aspirin or carbon dioxide in Alka Selzer. 10 hours after does not sound like it could be treatment related. The idea of using Alka Seltzer gives me a headache anyway!!!!!!!!!
Any resident chemists here at TM?

stchasking

Aspirin=Acetasalasylic Acid. Acid being the key word. I doubt if I spelled the first word correctly. The Acid will attack the silver and just about anything else but gold.

Put an aspirin on the tip of your tongue and see if you can resist the burning. Most people can't and a trumpet player should not do this for but a few seconds in order to get the point.

tpetplyr

Alka-Seltzer also has citric acid in it which reacts with the bicarb to produce the CO2 gas that is evolved. The citric acid is a slightly stronger acid than the aspirin, and is almost certainly present in higher quantities.

The question becomes one of whether or not citric acid is strong enough to oxidize silver, and whether this reaction is even possible. My guess is that the citric acid would oxidize the silver and reduce the hydrogen to hydrogen gas. If this is the case than the cell potential for that reaction is negative, meaning it is not thermodynamically favored and will not happen spontaneously. (That is actually independant of which acid is used, as it only involves the H+ created).

For comparision, the oxidation of zinc by hydrogen has a positive cell potential, indicating it does proceed spontaneously, which we all remember from pouring HCl on it in high school chemistry. In this case the strength of the acid simply determines the rate of the reaction by determining how much H+ is present in solution.

If it was indeed the AlkaSeltzer that corroded the finish, it had to have proceeded by a different pathway, which I can't see at this moment. I'm tempted to try it with one of the old mouthpieces I have lying around.

Another little tidbit. Placing tarnished silver on aluminum foil in a bicarb solution creates another redox reaction which reduces the oxidized (tarnished) silver back to silver metal onto the surface and evolves CO2 gas while moving the sulfur (which oxidized hte silver in the first place) to the now oxidized aluminum. Good way to polish a trumpet/mouthpiece etc without worrying about removing silver. The bicarb doesn't hurt the silver here and so it won't in AlkaSeltzer either.

Stuart
3rd Year, Chemistry
Georgia Tech

rowuk

I did try cleaning an old silver plated Bach mouthpiece yesterday with AlkaSelzer. It just cleaned up. Today 12 hours later, it is still clean.
I still would not use AlkaSeltzer to clean my mouthpieces. I do not approve of dumping medicines down the drain.
A brush and warm soapy water on a regular basis work just fine and I have been using the aluminum foil/silver trick for years.

bilboinsa

What is the trick?

Dale Proctor

Read the last paragraph of the 2nd post above yours.

treblemaker

I'm not sure what kind of mouthpiece it was, maybe Bach. All I know is it definitely wasn't shiny at all, and it looked like some species of big cat had gotten ahold of it and used it as a scratching post.

tromj

It's possible that the scratches had been covered up by the tarnish and dirt.

GordonH

I saw the bicarb trick demonstrated on a TV show for cleaning silver. They covered a small bowl with aluminium foild na washed the very dirty silver items in it with a bicarb solution. The results were astonishing for surprisingly little work.