Sprayaway or Rainbow Cleaner

Beyond the Manual
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Hi! I buy some of my materials from Smokey Hills. They sell a product for $18 called Rainbow Glass and Surface cleaner (from the manufacturer, one can buy a can of Rainbow for $3.18 plus $8 for shipping). Smokey Hills touts this for cleaning soot off their eco products and acrylic. I saw a similar looking can at Home Depot called Sprayaway Glass Cleaner. I gave it a try. It works alright - could be better. I looked at both products Safety Data Sheets to determine if Rainbow and Sprayaway are actually the same thing, and they seem to be quite similar. Or rather, they look similar to my unscientific mind, but who knows. Anyway, that research led me nowhere. Has anyone used both of these products and can tell me if it’s worth it to spring for the Rainbow cleaner? I usually mask my materials, but they insist you won’t need to mask if you use the Rainbow. Let me know.

(Also- in case anyone is interested, from what I could glean from the SDS for both products, Rainbow Glass cleaner tests on rats and rabbits, but Sprayaway Glass Cleaner tests on those, plus dogs, cats, and monkeys. You learn something new every day …)

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First off, no, I haven’t tried either.
But secondly, I wrote a paper in college about why animals should not be used in testing. My sister got super angry at me because I made it all up. I created my own statistics, my own sources, and even my own publishing companies to use in my bibliography. Nothing in the paper was real, and I got an A+. My sister has called me a cheater ever since.

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:rofl: In college I wrote a paper for a particularly horrible professor. I sort of did the same thing, except I peppered the paper with ridiculous quotations. They were obnoxiously awful, but I had realized early on in the semester that he wasn’t reading anything I sent in. :woman_shrugging: I lost all respect for him when he gave me an A. Graduated with a 4.0 and a distaste for alcoholic, bearded, sexist, professors with pregnancy bellies and huge biceps who smell like cabbage. No wonder I gave up pursuing a doctorates in US history and instead bought a Glowforge. :rofl:

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I’m going to assume you mean sprayway - it’s the only glass cleaner I use since I discovered it over two decades ago.

That said, although I have it everywhere, I’ve never used it on acrylic. I just use isopropyl alcohol. It’s cheap and I have it on-hand all the time.

I have no idea what Rainbow is, but I’ve never felt I needed anything else.

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I also cleaned all my acrylic with isopropanol, but 99% of that was just cuts. I recently engraved something unmasked because I didn’t want to pick out all the little bits, and after I tried to remove the haze with alcohol, it caused horrible crazing.

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E4187C62-45BE-42E4-9CD4-321B526C34C0_1_102_o1920Ă—1440 333 KB

I just went back to leaving the masking on, it seemed like a better tradeoff.

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The masking residue after engraving drives me nuts. I like the dishsoap mask. I have also been hit with crazing.

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That’s just craze-y.

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Oh gosh, you’re right. Oops. I’ve been calling it Sprayaway :rofl: Though what a missed opportunity for them. “Sprayaway” makes more sense.

Would alcohol take off the finish on wood? I just started buying walnut with a clear coat on top. I may try it on the backside of a piece to test that out. Thanks!

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Just try it on your materials. There’s no one answer.

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