# autosmart red7



## the_jj (Apr 7, 2010)

Has anyone used it yet? it looks more watery than something like iron x. 
thanks in advance.


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## realist (May 11, 2011)

On my 2nd 5 litres of this, works well and at £25 it's a no brainer, unless you like inferior products in fancy bottles for more money:thumb:


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## Kimo (Jun 7, 2013)

The general thing is, yes it bleeds but takes more hits to work than its competitors, therefore kind of a false economy. 

May be half the price of others but when you need more hits, is it really worth it


Not so much a fancy bottle business as a better product business


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## Brian1612 (Apr 5, 2015)

Agree with this^ Have to remember this red7 contains half the active amount of active ingredients compared to others going by another thread on here.

Have to say though for anyone thinking this red7 is good value... I picked up 5L of high definition detail ferrous fall out gel which neat works stupidly well. Diluted 1:1 works just as effectively but creates a thinner viscosity product. £35 for 10L of diluted fall out remover which works still after a blast of Korrosol and smells like pear... best I have come across so far.


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## the_jj (Apr 7, 2010)

Thanks for the reply guys!:thumb:


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## The Doctor (Sep 11, 2007)

Kimo said:


> The general thing is, yes it bleeds but takes more hits to work than its competitors, therefore kind of a false economy.
> 
> May be half the price of others but when you need more hits, is it really worth it
> 
> Not so much a fancy bottle business as a better product business


Really? From various detailers mouths it works just as good and in some people's opinions better than some similar products. Can you show evidence that it takes more hits than similar products?


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## The Doctor (Sep 11, 2007)

Brian1612 said:


> Agree with this^ Have to remember this red7 contains half the active amount of active ingredients compared to others going by another thread on here.
> 
> Have to say though for anyone thinking this red7 is good value... I picked up 5L of high definition detail ferrous fall out gel which neat works stupidly well. Diluted 1:1 works just as effectively but creates a thinner viscosity product. £35 for 10L of diluted fall out remover which works still after a blast of Korrosol and smells like pear... best I have come across so far.


Where do you get this information from regarding the active ingredients? Again, could you show evidence to back that statement up?


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## adjones (Apr 24, 2013)

The Doctor said:


> Where do you get this information from regarding the active ingredients? Again, could you show evidence to back that statement up?


The safety data sheet shows it to be weaker than iron-x, by a distance. You can see it both from the composition and the density. If you care to check a refractometer, several other products are comfortably 50 percent higher activity. You can try to argue that this is other ingredients but the specific gravities are in agreement with the refractometer readings.

If you test for yourself, it is clear as day.


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## The Doctor (Sep 11, 2007)

adjones said:


> The safety data sheet shows it to be weaker than iron-x, by a distance. You can see it both from the composition and the density. If you care to check a refractometer, several other products are comfortably 50 percent higher activity. You can try to argue that this is other ingredients but the specific gravities are in agreement with the refractometer readings.
> 
> If you test for yourself, it is clear as day.


You cannot check the 'strength' of a product using a refractometer. The only way to accurately test the strength of such a product is by using gas chromatography mass spectrometry in a lab. The 'thickness' or general appearance is also no indication of the strength of a product.

Where is the Iron X sds sheet? The only thing I can find is this http://www.ttforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=263711 which shows no percentage values.

Either way the only way to access which one works better is by doing a side by side test, not trying to play online chemists.


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## fatdazza (Dec 29, 2010)

Red 7 MSDS states 10-15% Sodium mecaptoacetate

The ironx MSDS I have states 3-25% ammonium sulfanylacetate

So not much can be deduced from these? Apart from one uses the ammonium salt, and one the sodium salt.


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## sean ryan (May 10, 2015)

I bought 5ltr's of Red 7 of my rep last week and tbh it worked just as good as Iron X and was far better than certain other big brands that iv'e used in the past


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## The Doctor (Sep 11, 2007)

fatdazza said:


> Red 7 MSDS states 10-15% Sodium mecaptoacetate
> 
> The ironx MSDS I have states 3-25% ammonium sulfanylacetate
> 
> So not much can be deduced from these? Apart from one uses the ammonium salt, and one the sodium salt.


Thanks for posting. It certainly does not show that Iron X is 'twice the strength' Infact it show that Iron x could be twice as weak! Its all irrelevant anyway since the only way of testing the real world performance of both is a side by side comparison.


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## adjones (Apr 24, 2013)

The Doctor said:


> You cannot check the 'strength' of a product using a refractometer. The only way to accurately test the strength of such a product is by using gas chromatography mass spectrometry in a lab. The 'thickness' or general appearance is also no indication of the strength of a product.
> 
> Where is the Iron X sds sheet? The only thing I can find is this http://www.ttforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=263711 which shows no percentage values.
> 
> Either way the only way to access which one works better is by doing a side by side test, not trying to play online chemists.


Not everyone is 'online'.

Right, lets go. Refractometer _does_ give a guide as to the strength. It is not an absolute measurement, but it is a good guide. If using the same type of refractometer, you can make fairly respectable comparisons between products. You cannot tell precisely what is in there, but you can tell approximately what level of dissolved solids are present. You might not tell the difference between emulsion products or products with 2 and 2.5% solids, but between 2 and 5 is night and day. I was fairly clear that I was drawing conclusions based also on the density/specific gravity. Iron-X is significantly more dense than red 7. As it happens, the relative difference is actually the same as one would imply from the refractometer data. It would be extremely naive to take two independent methods of approximating the strength, find they agree and then (without really good scientific reasoning) calling them meaningless.

As an aside, you might wonder why the density is a measure of strength. Simple - the active ingredient is very dense, nothing else in the product is even close. If you can measure the density, you can get a feeling for the activity of the product.

_My facts dealt with, I am keen to learn about your methodology with GCMS. How does this translate across to non-volatile substances? The active ingredient in these products is totally non-volatile - you cannot get it into the gas phase. How does one propose to measure it with gas chromatography?_


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## The Doctor (Sep 11, 2007)

adjones said:


> Not everyone is 'online'.
> 
> Right, lets go. Refractometer _does_ give a guide as to the strength. It is not an absolute measurement, but it is a good guide. If using the same type of refractometer, you can make fairly respectable comparisons between products. You cannot tell precisely what is in there, but you can tell approximately what level of dissolved solids are present. You might not tell the difference between emulsion products or products with 2 and 2.5% solids, but between 2 and 5 is night and day. I was fairly clear that I was drawing conclusions based also on the density/specific gravity. Iron-X is significantly more dense than red 7. As it happens, the relative difference is actually the same as one would imply from the refractometer data. It would be extremely naive to take two independent methods of approximating the strength, find they agree and then (without really good scientific reasoning) calling them meaningless.
> 
> ...


I hear all this talk of refractometers on a regular basis with TFR products. The products with higher solids readings do not always clean better. You can dissolve salt or sugar in there and it will increase the reading on the meter but won't help product performance one bit. Iron x is thicker than red 7. Could it be that there are other ingredients in there to thicken it that are showing on the meter?

As I said the only way to conclude which product works better is a side by side test in the real world. Maybe you should do one and prove your statement?

I have no idea how they use GC/MS to compare the products but I have a letter from the lab at Autosmart informing me that that is the only way to accurately measure the composition of such products.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk


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## adjones (Apr 24, 2013)

The Doctor said:


> I hear all this talk of refractometers on a regular basis with TFR products. The products with higher solids readings do not always clean better. You can dissolve salt or sugar in there and it will increase the reading on the meter but won't help product performance one bit. Iron x is thicker than red 7. Could it be that there are other ingredients in there to thicken it that are showing on the meter?


Sorry but 'come on'. I explained this in the previous post. TFR is a different matter and this is why an amateur should not be drawing conclusions. There is chemistry involved and you have to understand how a product works and what goes into it. TFR is an excellent example where you can have high solids (and matching density) yet still have a cheap nasty product. The reason will almost always be caustics which are cheap per active and heavy. With the fallout products, the active is the 'heavy' bit. Look at the SDS and (if you know about the chemicals) you will realise that nothing else in there compares in density. So the density of the product is coming from the active material, more density means more active content. Look at the ingredients list and (again if you understand who the ingredients work in such products) you will realise that the bulk of the product is made by the primary active, not by the surfactants/solvents/thickeners/etc. So, again, the solids number is a good guide. In the case of iron-x, the viscosity is going to be largely caused by ionic thickening of the ether sulphate by the active ingredient. In many ways, this is how low-mid shampoos gain viscosity. This will have nothing to do with the density or the products (ether sulphate is not anywhere as dense as the active) and the solids level will only be skewed slightly because the ether sulphate content is not high (a few percent) because it is simply not needed.

You do not always need complex methodology to gain insight to a product. A trained analytical scientist can easily pull together multiple characteristics to understand how a product works. This is not always the case but it certainly is in this case.



> As I said the only way to conclude which product works better is a side by side test in the real world. Maybe you should do one and prove your statement?


You should know as well as I do that you would not actually accept my results. Heck, I am telling you about analytical measurements of the products and you are choosing to disagree.



> I have no idea how they use GC/MS to compare the products but I have a letter from the lab at Autosmart informing me that that is the only way to accurately measure the composition of such products.


Oh my, if that isn't reason to question the Autosmart lab, I don't know what is. Sorry, but you cannot do it with GCMS. You might get further with HPLC (or a combination) but I fear that you still be way short of a full breakdown. They are right that my above methodology could not break down a product completely, with no further information. Thankfully I have more information in the form of MSDS which tell me many of the ingredients. One assumes that Autosmart are adhering to the detergents regulations and thus I have a vague idea of anything else in there are well. As above, if you know how ingredients interact and why you are using them, you can then infer a great many things. As you then do analytical measurements, you can infer and confirm some and more. To completely break down a product is extremely difficult and I would suggest that AS do not actually have the equipment or experience to do it on a completely mystery product. I suspect that there are few labs in the country which would be capable of doing this without some of the background work which I have engaged in above. GCMS will be useful for many things but it is one analytical tool, it cannot identify everything (non-volatiles - as should be obvious to anyone who understands the words 'non-volatile' and 'gas' - amongst them). If you look at any half decent QC lab, GCMS will be there, but there will be dozen of other techniques necessary to identify and quantify the components of a product to be within spec. When you consider that this is the case for the actual manufacturer (who actually knows what is in there in the first place), surely you must appreciate that an 'unknown' product can absolutely not be fully broken down by a single instrument like GCMS. If the AS lab has some way of doing it, they need to forget about chemical manufacturing because they would be into billions by the time they had talked to a few companies in the pharma industry.


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## james_death (Aug 9, 2010)

For me forget all the chemistry joe blog doesn't give a flying fig and neither do i. I simply want to know what works best side by side, been there and done that in the past.

I don't have the red-7 but way back when i was comparing fallout removers just the regular autosmart fallout remover worked was more a two hit product but as a maintenance fallout remover it worked well.

If the red-7 is stronger stuff bring it on.


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## The Doctor (Sep 11, 2007)

adjones said:


> Sorry but 'come on'. I explained this in the previous post. TFR is a different matter and this is why an amateur should not be drawing conclusions. There is chemistry involved and you have to understand how a product works and what goes into it. TFR is an excellent example where you can have high solids (and matching density) yet still have a cheap nasty product. The reason will almost always be caustics which are cheap per active and heavy. With the fallout products, the active is the 'heavy' bit. Look at the SDS and (if you know about the chemicals) you will realise that nothing else in there compares in density. So the density of the product is coming from the active material, more density means more active content. Look at the ingredients list and (again if you understand who the ingredients work in such products) you will realise that the bulk of the product is made by the primary active, not by the surfactants/solvents/thickeners/etc. So, again, the solids number is a good guide. In the case of iron-x, the viscosity is going to be largely caused by ionic thickening of the ether sulphate by the active ingredient. In many ways, this is how low-mid shampoos gain viscosity. This will have nothing to do with the density or the products (ether sulphate is not anywhere as dense as the active) and the solids level will only be skewed slightly because the ether sulphate content is not high (a few percent) because it is simply not needed.
> 
> You do not always need complex methodology to gain insight to a product. A trained analytical scientist can easily pull together multiple characteristics to understand how a product works. This is not always the case but it certainly is in this case.
> 
> ...


So are you going to do a side by side test? If your so confident your refractometer and reading of the sds sheets is right then why not do a test? I would do it but don't have any iron x left as I no longer buy it since I got red 7. You can come up with 'they don't know what there doing but I do' all you like but nobody is really interested in what readings a 'spy glass' gives or what the sds says they want a product that works. If your not prepared to show some real world results of both products side by side then it's unfair to bash a product without any evidence to back your statement up. Have you ever even used Red 7?

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk


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## adjones (Apr 24, 2013)

The Doctor said:


> So are you going to do a side by side test? If your so confident your refractometer and reading of the sds sheets is right then why not do a test? I would do it but don't have any iron x left as I no longer buy it since I got red 7. You can come up with 'they don't know what there doing but I do' all you like but nobody is really interested in what readings a 'spy glass' gives or what the sds says they want a product that works. If your not prepared to show some real world results of both products side by side then it's unfair to bash a product without any evidence to back your statement up. Have you ever even used Red 7?
> 
> Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk


I responded when you posed the question:



The Doctor said:


> Where do you get this information from regarding the active ingredients? Again, could you show evidence to back that statement up?


I gave you the evidence. I am not bashing the product, I am giving an answer to your question. It is you who is turning this around, once it is clear that scientific arguments are actually against you.

Have I used Red 7 - yes, I have. Is it a bad product? No. Is it a revolutionary product which trumps all others (as AS marketing might lead you to believe)? I would have been - 10 years ago. It works fine but it isn't a market leader. in my view, it is fine on light contamination but will need multiple hits on something heavier. It also dries more quickly than I would like. I am not the first person to say this - in fact it wasn't even me who brought it up (I wouldn't have even commented except that it appeared that you were potentially going to try to discredit a statement which, on the face of it appears accurate).

As an addition, the comments with regards to the AS lab statements should not be neglected. Can you actually produce this letter? Your having mentioned it makes one of two things clear. Either, the lab guys really don't know what they are talking about or you made it up to try to bolster your argument.


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## Juke_Fan (Jul 12, 2014)

adjones said:


> As an addition, the comments with regards to the AS lab statements should not be neglected. Can you actually produce this letter? Your having mentioned it makes one of two things clear. *Either, the lab guys really don't know what they are talking about or you made it up to try to bolster your argument.*


I will be neutral in this as I freely admit to knowing nothing about chemistry but there is another way to view this.....that the AS lab guys know more than you?

Not saying this is true but just being neutral and looking at all the possibilities.


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## s70rjw (Apr 18, 2006)

I've used it a couple of times. Previously used Gyeon iron remover. Im more than happy with the red 7 performance both on wheels and bodywork.


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## den656 (Mar 30, 2014)

Just reading this thread , it's like an argument between Walter White ,and Jesse from breaking bad lol ,just had to mention lol ,but I won't choose who is who , end of the day regardless of strengths I will always go with what works for me personally, which in this case is revolt from car chem ,bigger things to worry about than strength of iron removers but I will not be happy on this thread until we can get the two chaps into a gladiator combat scenario ,only kidding obviously lol ,Den .


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## Juke_Fan (Jul 12, 2014)

:lol:


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