Steps of Cleaning Tattoo Machines

Cleaning tattoo machines is an important procedure in the tattoo process. Due to the specialty of the tattoo machines, common ways of cleaning such as using warm water or rag to polish the whole set won’t actually do good. Because on the part of tattoo machines, the “dust” for them means invisible bacteria left over the device after treating each customer. Experienced and professional tattoo artists take highly priority of cleaning procedure, namely sterilization, which you may follow through below steps to gain a little more extra knowledge for developing your tattoo career:

Usually, tattoo artists take professional apparatus called ultrasonic cleaner to finish the procedure. When starting cleaning your tattoo machine, you need to first disassemble three parts of the tattoo equipments, grip, tube, and tip. Due to different tattoo machines, unloading order may differ according to the machines. Before the real sterilization these parts need some basic cleaning, like using clean water and antibacterial soaps to wash lightly the surface. After preparedness has been done, full the ultrasonic cleaner tank with proper sum of water to hold the disassembled parts. And then turn on the clean machine for about 5-10 minutes. Take out the grip, tube and tip to dry, naturally, or by special clean rag.

Finishing all the advance-phase preparation, we may enter into the sterilizing step of the cleaning. At this process, we use apparatus called autoclave sterilizer which could kill living HIV that ultrasonic cleaner could not kill. Take three bags to contain the grip, tube, and tip respectively, and make ready three sterilization trays for the three bags. Please keep note that the bags should be sealed off and have their respective sterilizer tray. Some autoclave machines may have one tray itself and only allow you to sterilize one at each time. Then do not try to take all by once.

Pour the autoclave sterilizer with distilled water about up at the middle, and start the machine for 1-2 hours for the sterilizing. When it’s ready and the indicating number turns to 0, you could put your gloves to take the bags off and dry them.

Basically, this is the whole procedure of cleaning the tattoo machines. Please note that do not wash the whole set in water, which will get the coils rusted by soaking the water.