Binocular Cleaning and what exactly is BINTEL Jungle Juice?

BINTEL's long time telescope and optical wizard, Don Whiteman, has some handy advice for cleaning your binos -and the best part is you don't need anything too special and it can be done by anyone at home!

Cleaning my Binoculars

I’ve been out looking for the comet in the evening sky and roaming around in the morning twilight looking for that elusive bird and when I came back inside I noticed that my good binos have gunk on them and marks on the lens from outside and fingerprints.

How the hell do I clean them back to pristine, keeping my bino’s clean is fairly easy and can be done with household thingys. (Yes, that's a technical term.)

Chuck Wipes at Woolies

First thing to do is give them a wipe off with a cloth, if they are waterproof use a Chux soaked in warm soapy water (wring it out well first) wipe over the outside of the body of the bino’s, if there’s sand or dirt in the shoulder joint use a hurricane blower to puff it off, wiping could accidentally scratch the lenses.

We use Bintel Cleaning Solution for the lenses, you can use Windex in place of it.

BINTEL UHTC Cleaning Solution

First blow any dust particles off the glass with your hurricane blower.

Hurricane Blower at BINTEL

You can also use compressed air, but make sure it\'s compressed in a car - not from a mechanical compressor like those found in a workshop or even to power airbrushes.  These can spray small amounts of oil and lubricants onto your optical surfaces.

This is the "air in a can" spray we used at BINTEL for cleaning away dust and grit.

Jaycar Dust Remover Spray Can

You can get it from Jaycar stores.

The reason for blowing away dust and grit rather than wiping it away it is to avoid scratching the lenses. Once you\'ve blown away as much as possible spray a little cleaning solution /windex onto a couple of plain soft (unscented) tissues and gently wipe the objective lenses first (they’re the big lenses at the front, then twist or fold the eyecups down and using another couple of tissues with a light spray of our cleaning liquid gently wipe the eye lenses. Do this gently and don\'t rub hard. Let the cleaning solution do the work for you. You might need to do this a few times until you see all the stains and muck removed from the lenses.

The reason we use unscented, plain tissues is because they minimal scents and moisturisers which might smear on the lenses