Originally Posted by
DropBarFan
Paper coffee filters remove sand/grit from mineral spirits/kerosene but don't completely remove black grime even using 2 bottles of solvent to clean. One could use 3rd or 4th bottle of solvent but unless one introduces new ($$ & non-green) solvent all the bottles will get blackish. I used to use spray degreaser & water hose to clean chains (& before that scrubbing chain in kerosene). But now spray degreasers are much weaker & IMHO somewhat useless.
Anyway, are there better methods to filter solvent than coffee filters? Perhaps a car/truck oil filter?
You are misunderstanding what is happening when you use a solvent. When you use it on your chain, you'll get a mixture of solvent, oil and particulates. In chemistry we call this a heterogeneous mixture. You can separate the particulates from the solvent/lubricant mixture with the coffee filter. Now you'll have a homogenous mixture. A homogeneous mixture can't be separated by simple filtration. You could distill it but that's not easy to do at home nor would I suggest it, even if you had the training. And, if you had the training to do a distillation, you'd know enough not to do it at home.
The good news is that a mineral spirits will carry a lot of chain lubricant and still be very effective.