On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, chris wrote:
>How cheap is it? How does it compare to
Coke, in
particular? Coke
has sugar
and caffiene mixed in, but also has a good deal of
phosophoric acid in it. (I'm assuming, of course, plenty of water
rinse
afterwards.)
Myth Busters on TV did an episode about the myths of Coke. I was
surprised to see that it really DID clean battery terminals
in a car
better than water. It also appeared to do a
better job of cleaning
chrome than the chrome polish they tested against (they didn't say
what the brand was they tried).
However, it didn't appear to do anything for degreasing an
engine, or
disolving meat or teeth :-)
It *does* dissolve pennies, and it *does* eat through paint.
It also happily dissolves teeth - the standard "experiment" in
primary schools here (in the UK) is to have kids bring in teeth
(as they fall out naturally :-)) and leave them in a glass of
coke for a few days (and have a control of a tooth in a glass
of air there too). Tooth-in-coke looks pretty bad after a
few days whereas tooth-in-air does not look much worse than
when it started.
Of course, a real experiment might want to test things like
orange juice as well as coke but then we'd find that OJ is
about as bad as coke. (Although I don't think OJ does anything
for battery terminals - but then if you keep them coated
in petroleum jelly you probably won't need to clean them
in the first place).
Antonio
--
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Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org