Don't give up hope just yet.
It may not be heat coloring (wait, does Al heat color? Or just melt?), but rather just volatile cook-off deposits.
Yeah, bummer in any case, but... there are several things to try. First, warm soapy water (dish washing
detergent, like Ivory, anything without lanolin/hand-softening products, perfume, and other such pollutants).
Get sink (bowl, whatever) nice and mixed/sudsy, then swoosh the reflector in the sudsy water (good,
vigorous agitation). Do NOT touch the reflector surface, you just want soapy water impact to do all the
work,without scratching the surface. An Ultrasonic cleaner would be ideal for this! (Damn, I knew there
was a reason I wanted to buy one...). If soapy water doesn't work, try the same (general) idea with Alcohol
or any other convenient organic solvent/cleaner you may handy. WARNING: while water and alcohol
are relatively benign, almost everything else in the world is hazardous to your body chemistry: WEAR
GLOVES (rubber/chemical-resistant). Carbon Tet, Ampex Tape Head Cleaner (AMAZING stuff, but...),
etc. can all do quite a number on your biochemistry; a mere flashlight reflector is not that important!
If the whatever doesn't clean off, then try again (soapy water, alcohol, other escalating chem warfare
agents) but this time use a Q-Tip (cotton swab) and ever so gently draw the Q-Tip from the inside to the
outer edge of the reflector ONCE, rinse, and see if that helped any. If that does work, then you can procede
to try cleaning the whole reflector with the Q-Tip(whatever) being as gentle as possible. You WILL scratch
the reflector, but if you're gentle the scratches will be more esthetic than problematical -- they make look
OhMyGawdHorrible, but probably won't make any RealWorld(tm) difference in the reflected beam pattern. It will
most affect smooth/shiny reflector for max throw, and least affect MOP/HOP/Stippled reflectors for floodier
beam spread.
Given that the reflector is already "destroyed" (that's a value judgement for you to make), there isn't any real
harm is scrubbing more aggressively (above steps) to see if you can scrub the haze/whatever off, just as a
reference point.
Another alternative you might try (short of aggressive scrubbing) is any of the spray cleaners (BrakeClean(tm)
alt BrakeKleen(tm) is pretty handy for removing stuff that shouldn't be there, but again you don't want to in-
hale or otherwise ingest any more of it than you can avoid).
Good Luck!
-RDH
