Na
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I used a big bag of rice to clean the soot and char. Works quite well and quickly. The wife dropped her phone in a lake last month and I had used the rice as a desiccant. Still had it hanging around.
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Added bonus: rice Pilaf benefits from that campfire aroma!
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A little extra peal off in the pilaf?
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You called?
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The grain in my daughter’s rock tumbler is much finer than salt. The final compound is more fine than sand. I think it would work well. Also, I used salt yesterday to clean leather out of the forge before burnishing. Worked great and is keeping my burnisher much cleaner.
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Excellent news on your results!
I hadn’t looked very extensively at tumblers; really only watched a video of a cheap parts tumbler from Harbor Freight. It looked like a lot of the media was walnut shells, larger plastics, etc. So the media in your daughters tumbler being finer than salt is great. I wasn’t 100% sure of the construction and didn’t want it slipping out everywhere through a shaft connection or something. Thank you!
The good news is it should only take a few mins in the tumbler versus a few weekends 
i has also considered something like a small vibrating table (not as fancy as ultrasonic cleaners) - just something driven by a small concrete vibrator or something. That’s probably overkill though and way more of a pain to rig up.
The tumbler we have has a rubber gasket that prevents leaking. It’s fairly small and a bit noisy (especially with rocks in it). We got it for a science fair project. The good thing is that it has two barrels which may be fairly standard, which means you could put two puzzles in at once without having to sort pieces later.
We also have a concrete vibrator thing that you put on the edge of a concrete form to vibrate out the air bubbles. That might work on a table, but seems a little more of a pain. the good thing about that is you could put puzzles in ziploc bags with salt and then vibrate them all at once that way.
I used a mixture of pink himalyan and table salt (because that’s what I had on hand) and it worked beautifully, but I could probably have also used the grinding materials that came with the tumbler. But they’re more expensive. Some of the salt sticks to the face of the leather, but I just washed it off before dyeing. I was a little concerned the salt might react in some way with either the material or the dyeing process, but it doesn’t seem to have. I was also a bit worried it might grind away at the engraved portions, but it didn’t.
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Great tip - thanks for sharing!
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Haven’t used a tumbler in decades, but I recall using plastic pellets as a cushioning agent in addition to the various grits and polishing compounds. Is that still a thing?
This is great! I will absolutely be using this idea for small projects in various materials going forward. Thank you!
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Brilliant! The crystals actually scrape the piece…that’s really cool.
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Is that the 50 pt or 100 pt chipboard?
80 pt… 50 was too thin, 100 was too thick, 70 was just right.
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Thanks. So difficult finding archival quality chipboard.
It’s very difficult. The highest recommended one I could find was Eska but it’s impossible to find a retailer or wholesaler of it in the US. Eska direct won’t even reply to any kind of a small player. I tried - several times.
I ended up going through a distributor here in Texas (Olmsted Kirk/OK Paper). Apparently, this is made by Manchester Industries. And it’s actually 80pt - not 70. My bad.
The price isn’t bad for getting 1 bundle at a time.
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These guys have some interesting products if you are willing to buy by the pallet. Unfortunately nothing looks to be archival. Might be something there for future projects.
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What chipboard product did you purchase?
I have both sizes at Dick Blick (50 and 100 pt) and then 80 pt that I mentioned above from Olmsted Kirk.
@lairdknox: one of the many sites that I looked at! They have some great stuff.
Use the laser to melt the salt and burn off the residue 
But seriously I have melted salt with a fresnel lens
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