A few days ago David mentioned chip cleaners in a post and suggested that one was crude. Well here is CRUDE! Around the year 2000 I decided to try to design and build a chip cleaner at my steel fabricating shop. The first (and only) version was rather crude but it did work. I even went so far as to go to the Gaming Expo in Vegas that year to check out the competition. There was only one machine there and it started at $17K. I figured I could build my machine for about $2000. It would clean and dry a chip every 10-15 seconds and it ran just on compressed air. The machine ran as follows - you put a stack of chips in the left hand side. An air cylinder would grab one chip and take it down a ramp where it went from Horizontal to Vertical. It stopped at the cleaning station where 2 brushes would rub on it with the cleaning solution. An elevator would then lift the chip up to where it entered the drying station which was basically just a hairdryer. The dry chip would roll out the other end. I designed all of the air logic and it worked just great (much to my surprise!). The version you see was very crude but it was made to proved that it would work, not be beautiful. I was hoping to make the finished version out of machined stainless steel. I got the air from a car tire inflater but I think a good sized aquarium pump may have worked.