Hi Folks,
I know everyone has their favourite recipe for removing the ginger menace and I'm pretty sure the citric acid method has been covered many times, but here's my take on it.
I've tried a lot of commercial rust removal products over the years and found most are pretty poor. I also tried electrolysis but was not that impressed. I read about a citric acid bath before, so I thought I'd give a go - its very cheap so not much to lose.
Start of with a bag of food grade concentrate, 950g bag for about £5:
Rusty part:
After wire-brushing and degreasing, immerse parts in solution of about two cupfuls of the acid granules (about 400g) to 3 litres of water:
After just a couple of hours (with periodic agitating with a nylon brush) the rust started to float off:
On removal, 18 hours later, it looked as if the results were pretty unimpressive:
But the dull residue easily brushed off, to reveal this:
Just needed a small amount of further treatment to remove the last traces of rust.
Another part, you can see the citric acid even removes rust from the pits which is very difficult to do with sanding/wire brushing alone:
This is probably the best result I've ever had with rust removing solutions. And the cheapest too!
I know everyone has their favourite recipe for removing the ginger menace and I'm pretty sure the citric acid method has been covered many times, but here's my take on it.
I've tried a lot of commercial rust removal products over the years and found most are pretty poor. I also tried electrolysis but was not that impressed. I read about a citric acid bath before, so I thought I'd give a go - its very cheap so not much to lose.
Start of with a bag of food grade concentrate, 950g bag for about £5:
Rusty part:
After wire-brushing and degreasing, immerse parts in solution of about two cupfuls of the acid granules (about 400g) to 3 litres of water:
After just a couple of hours (with periodic agitating with a nylon brush) the rust started to float off:
On removal, 18 hours later, it looked as if the results were pretty unimpressive:
But the dull residue easily brushed off, to reveal this:
Just needed a small amount of further treatment to remove the last traces of rust.
Another part, you can see the citric acid even removes rust from the pits which is very difficult to do with sanding/wire brushing alone:
This is probably the best result I've ever had with rust removing solutions. And the cheapest too!
