What would you use to clean a flak jacket that has sweat stains on it?
Question:My husband is getting out of the Marine's in one week. He's got to clean & turn in all of his gear, before he gets out. There's 2 problems his flak jacket and sunglasses. The flak jacket has sweat stains on it. And the sunglasses have a strap on it that needs cleaned. The strap on the sunglasses has marks from and ink pen and permanent marker. I believe the straps for the sunglasses is made of the same type of material as the flack jacket. He already tried to clean the pieces of gear. Using a mix of liquid soap and a pressure washer. And that didn't work. So, I told him that I'd try to clean the stuff for him. If anyone if familar with cleaning miltary gear like this, could you please tell me what to use to clean them off. Thanks.
Answers:
For the ink, try rubbing alcohol straight and agitate with a toothbrush. For the permanent marker, acetone (like in nail polish remover) is the only thing that will remove it. For the sweat, try straight ammonia. If that doesn't work, lather up a bar of fels-naptha soak, work it into the stains, let sit for a while and then soak in a solution of 1 cup borax in enough water to cover the flak jacket and rinse in a solution of vinegar and water to neutralize the soap.
Thank your husband for his service. Semper Fi!
When I was in the Army I use to clean all of my gear with simple shampoo and that seemed to do a pretty good job. What I would do is get a large tupperware container (like you store stuff in) fill it with warm water and a generous amount of shampoo and put the jacket into it and let it soak for about a day, then take it out, scrub it with a stiff bristle brush and spray it with a hose and let it dry. I use to clean the straps in my Kevlar like this (when they had straps) and it worked great. Give it a shot!
If that doesn't work, the other thing I used was a product called simple green. That might work better on the sunglasses strap, but I doubt that you'll be able to get the marker out of it. Also, I would check that you have to actually turn that in. Most CIF's don't want things like that back since they are fairly cheap and really aren't meant to last a long time. I know I always use to put all kinds of effort into cleaning my gear and then when I went to turn it in I always had a bunch of crap left over that they didn't want back and I was always pissed over the amount of time I wasted trying to clean it!
More Related Questions & Answers...