Much of this maintenance involves keeping parts clean, and with 280 vehicles to maintain, you can imagine Jay Leno does a lot of cleaning. Sure, it’s not as glamorous as taking a spin in an ultra-rare McLaren F1, but it definitely comes with the territory. Luckily, Jay and his head mechanic Bernard Juchli know how to work smarter—not harder—by using ultrasonic cleaning technologies from Omegasonics.

How Omegasonics and Jay Leno Linked Up

Our customer relationship with Jay Leno began around a decade ago when a world-renowned restoration expert by the name of Arnold Schmidt was contracted to help Leno restore an original steam engine. As mentioned before, older parts need to be cleaned gently, completely and without harsh chemicals to restore them to functioning order without degrading their integrity in any way. These needs make ultrasonic cleaning baths a perfect fit for any classic car restoration garage.

Unfortunately for Schmidt, his shop did not have the right type of cleaning equipment. Rather than “borrow” a machine or use its services, Schmidt saw this as a prime opportunity to convince Leno that an ultrasonic cleaner would be a worthy investment for his garage, especially if he was going to be restoring and maintaining hard-to-replace parts on a regular basis. Our go-to sales guy Joe Gilbert went out to Jay’s Garage with an Omegasonics Super Pro model and gave him a demonstration.

Naturally, Jay fell in love at first sight. This system literally did all the cleaning for him, and it did so without any harsh or toxic chemicals. Instead, just a warm, soapy bath of biodegradable detergent was all it needed. We showed him how to work it himself and left the rest is history.

Not at all to our surprise, Jay gave us a call the next day. “Do you take credit cards?” he asked.

“Yes, we do,” Joe replied.

“Good,” said Jay, before quipping, “because my wife likes the free miles.”

Sharing the Ultrasonic Love

We also made a customer in Jay’s head mechanic, Bernard, although he didn’t quite take to the process as easily. Joe dropped by for a visit to Bernard’s office, and discovered that the water was not nearly hot enough and did not contain enough soap. While Bernard was on the phone, Joe took it upon himself to clean some small parts laying nearby.

Impressed, Bernard wanted to know what he had been doing wrong. He was so relieved when Joe re-explained the process that Jay called on his behalf the next day to personally thank him. To this day, we still send Joe out to Bernard’s garage just to make sure everything’s working as it should.

Thanks to the likes of Jay, Bernard and Arnold Schmidt, classic car restorers and mechanics have become a niche clientele of ours, fondly asking for the “deep fryer looking thing” Jay keeps in his garage.

Ultrasonic cleaners represent a revolutionary breakthrough in the cleaning process. Industrial ultrasonic cleaners are not exactly new, but how they work may be something of a mystery to perspective users. The process is well-understood and well developed, so here is a brief explanation to demystify their operation. Ultrasonic cleaning uses high frequency sound waves to agitate a liquid. The agitated liquid acts on and dislodges contaminants adhering to objects being cleaned.

Ultrasonic means above the range of human hearing. Think dog whistle, although in many applications, the frequencies are even way beyond what a dog (or a bat, which actually sends out ultrasonic waves as a form of sonar) would be able to hear.

Watch Jay Leno demo his Omegasonics ultrasonic cleaner in his “Green Garage” by cleaning a piston that had caked on carbon, as well as a part that was heavily rusted.

Industrial ultrasonic cleaners consist of an ultrasound generator along with special transducers (instead of speakers) mounted on the bottom of a liquid-filled stainless steel bath. The generator and transducers create waves in the liquid, which cause it to alternately expand and contract. This expansion and contraction will occur between 25,000 to 130,000 times a second, depending on the application.

The energy transmitted to the liquid from the transducers causes bubbles to form when areas of the liquid vaporize, becoming a gas. During the expansion phase, the pressure from the surrounding liquid on these bubbles decreases, causing the bubbles to expand. This, in turn, causes the water vapor forming the bubble to rapidly condense leaving behind a vacuum-filled “cavity”.

During the compression phase, the pressure on the cavity from the surrounding liquid leads to a sudden collapse, or implosion, of the bubble. The liquid molecules collide, releasing a vast amount of impact energy. This energy rapidly increases the local temperature producing a high-energy liquid stream that collides with the surface of the object being cleaned. This collision agitates the contaminants adhering to the surface, effectively and efficiently dislodging them.

Ultrasonic cleaning can be thought of as “pressure washing” at the micron level (that’s 1 millionth of a meter, or one-thousandth of a millimeter!)

Next, we will look more closely at the liquid medium used by industrial ultrasonic cleaners, as well as other ways to optimize the process for particular applications.

If you have further questions about ultrasonic cleaners, feel free to contact one of our ultrasonic cleaning experts toll free at (888) 420-4445 or visit our website.

Perhaps one of our most interesting clients has been Jay Leno of the Tonight Show on NBC.

A Visit to Jay Leno’s Garage

Several years ago, the mechanics at Jay’s garage, where Jay owns and restores over 200 vehicles and motorcycles, came to us looking for a faster way to clean and refurbish their old car parts. Some of these parts are over 150 years old!

Soon enough we set Jay and his staff up with an Omegasonics Super Pro inside his garage. The Super Pro was the right choice for Jay because it gave him the versatility to clean almost any engine part. The Super Pro is an industrial sized machine designed to carry a heavy work load every day.

Previously, Jay’s staff was using toxic solvents and chemicals that produced skin irritations. The very next day after they received their Omegasonics machine, we had calls telling us how impressed they were. In just one day they had saved a ton of cleaning time.

I decided, along with our sales manager Joe Gilbert, to head down to Burbank, California to check out our Omegasonics machine in action. Jay now calls his garage his “Green Garage” in part to his Omegasonics Super Pro.

Our machine has been featured with Jay Leno in a past issue of Popular Mechanics, which can be found here.

You also may have noticed the video on our website where Jay and I use his machine to clean one of his caked on carbon pistons along with other items.

Jay Leno may be one of the funniest comedians in the world, but he doesn’t joke around when it comes to cleaning his cars!