Unfortunately the way most of us were taught about the conditions of matter was that it went from gas to liquid to solid (and for those that know about this a fourth condition is plasma but we won't be dealing with plasma). In many dive courses the implication was that salt water was just fresh water with salt disolved in it. That implied that when the salt became a solid you could return all of it back to a liquid by soaking it. Unfortunately it doesn't quite work that way. Salt water not only contains salt it contains everything else including minerals that when solidified do not reverse back to a liquid with soaking. An example that we are all familar would be the cement in concrete. When it cures it is solid and in fact it gets more durable if we soak it. Many rock quarries are almost like diving in diluted portland cement.
Regulators have so many convoluted shapes such as threaded areas etc that it is vitrually impossible to return even the most agreeable components back to a liquid form by soaking your gear regardless of how long you attempt the process. Once this happens the technician has to get much more aggressive in physically removing these deposits. Remember the key feature is to make sure that everything gets rinsed in mere minutes and not hours or days. The payback is well worth the effort for the minimum time expended.
Note: I will need to start a new thread with the "Bag Trick" in order to show the step by step process.
Edited by Senior Tech, 14 February 2005 - 03:42 PM.
