slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Mot exemptslater
@slater
Club Retro Rides Member 78
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Jan 25, 2022 11:55:39 GMT
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I think its quite scary how many people doubt their car so much they need to send to a MOT monkey to cast their eye over it every year. They arnt even allowed to check it over properly under MOT rules! What's scarier is the number of people who think they're competent enough to declare a car safe. You must have seen some of their 'fixes' - like structural panels fitted with silicone, deleting brake hoses for rigid pipe or budgie-curse word welding on steering components. They're the same people that only fixed faults because the MOT tester failed them. A disinterested inspection is always a good idea after major mechanical or restoration work. Totally agree with you on the concept but thats not an MOT thats needed its a proper maintenance inspection by a competent and accountable person.. The MOT is nothing but a peice of government bureaucracy which is unfit for purpose and totally corrupt. In current form it mainly exists as a money making racket for garages! You may know good MOT testers who are intelligent well trained engineers.. (I used to use one back in Suffolk) but after 10 years of trawling Birmingham for a decent MOT establishments ive found the vast majority are either completely corrupt, clueless or just doing nothing but going through the motions of a test that makes no sense soley to feed thier families. Not only does the MOT not test for some issues it tests for a myriad of things that are irrelivent to safety. The local MOT station now has about 10 bays and works 7 days a week. Its 50quid a go and they pass anything. It's all cash in hand and the money goes straight in the foreign guys drugs bag. That's the reality of the MOT system. Its worthless as any kind of 'official' proof of anything. Worthless to a buyer, worthless as 'history' and alot of the time even the owner doesn't know if it's a genuine pass or not. I send cars with faults and they come back as a pass. I send them perfect and they find some non existent fault to fail it on. It's nothing but a box ticking exercise even for someone who knows the buisness. Until the government step up and fix it just go to your competent mechanic of choice and get a proper inspection. don't go near 'the computer'!!! You will not only get a more thorough inspection but theres no obligation to fix silly 'non faults' that may crop up. No offense intended to anyone other then the wibblepoo system. I do get rather hacked off when people put 'the MOT' up there on some kind of pedestal tho so be warned! 😂
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Mot exemptslater
@slater
Club Retro Rides Member 78
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Jan 22, 2022 18:08:38 GMT
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I think its quite scary how many people doubt their car so much they need to send to a MOT monkey to cast their eye over it every year. They arnt even allowed to check it over properly under MOT rules!
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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That is the most interesting thing I have read for a very long time. And I do read some odd stuff! As a helpless hoarder, I have quite a lot of things with electronics in them, also I have the catalytic material from a P38 rangerover . If you PM me an address I will get it sent to you. My next recycling project is a crusher for vehicle switchgear to recover copper components. Might be too small for computer bits ? Cheers il PM you and address. What kind of crusher are you thinking? On my list to build is a decent hammer mill. Basically a drum with a flail inside and a punched screen in the bottom. Stuff goes in and gets pulverise until it will fit through the screen and fall out. It's perfect for liberating small metal parts from brittle plasticky stuff. I have a small plastics ganulator which is similar but has blades. Works to granulate copper cable (just about!) But prone to jamming up and the blades wear out quick. Trouble is once I get one I will also want a shaker table to separate the stuff and they take up some serious space 😭
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 19, 2022 16:46:38 GMT
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As for safety the key thing is a fume hood. I made one in the old lab by simply connecting the extraction fan that serves the rest of the workshop to a hood. It worked but the corrosive fumes eat anything metallic in the system and the fan died after a few years. The new hood is all PVC. Even the fan.
Otherwise it's the usual eye protection, gloves, lab clothes and being careful.
Then theres the waste treatment..
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 19, 2022 16:42:27 GMT
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Very interesting stuff. How would you potentially go about selling what you make eventually ? Are there other refiners that would buy it at a decent price to turn into something with an official purity/stamp/assay etc ? I can see your doing it because you can not necessarily fir straight up cash but I'm just curious how it can be got into the system to sell ? I've seen people trying to sell similar lumps they have made on ebay and just wondered if that's because they cannot sell it anywhere else ? No it's extremely easy to sell really. That's the beauty of holding gold over simply holding the scrap meterial or some other kind of less soluble investment. I simply take it to a buyer in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham and they will use thier xray spectroscopy gun to check purity there and then and hand over the appropriate cash. Theres plenty of 'we buy gold' places out there but be careful to find a 'top of the tree' buyer rather than just a dealer who wants to make a markup. If you don't know gold has a 'spot price' dependent on the financial metal markets (beware virtual gold is just that!) Usually I would expect a buyer to pay around 98% of the spot price or better. The one I use will even buy the alloyed meterial at 98% of its gold value meaning refining karat jewellery etc has little room to make any profit. You really only gain the value of the alloyed metals like silver. I do enjoy the investment side of it. The market is volatile so half of it is when you buy and when you sell. So far I've called it right buying a lot when it was at £30pg and selling about 25% of what I had at the peak of covid when it hit £50pg. A good profit but ultimately all gone back into equipment etc I guess. Silver is a little trickyer to get rid of in some ways. The metal merchants are paying more like 80% of spot yet scrap still sells for 110% or so on ebay etc. I turn all my silver into bars and sell those privately. The key thing with silver is it is liable for VAT where gold is not. As I'm not VAT registered however I can just about buy scrap, refine it and sell bars at the going rate and still make a profit. Basically i start 20% ahead of most people doing it from the off and can slightly undercut them while still having a margin. You can get them assayed and hallmarked if you want. Its about 10quid a time but most people don't bother. I guess they have to trust me.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 18, 2022 17:56:32 GMT
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£50 by the look of it. Be happy to give you that for it if you want?
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 18, 2022 15:27:08 GMT
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I have a few new genuine GM cats for some of the mid 90s models and thought with the current excitement for recycling I may get a few quid for them but I'm struggling to find anywhere sensible to even give me a price, any good ideas? Are there any details on them? If you have a serial number I can have a look and see if I can find out roughly what they are worth. Tbh I'm no expert at buying them. Just have an app which gives an idea of what's worth money and what isn't. Contrary to what you hear most don't seem to be worth a whole lot! Also palladium is down to nearly 40ppg and it's high was 70ppg back last year so the market price has plummeted back to sensible levels now really.. still would be interested to get more just to experiment with so drop me an message if you want.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 18, 2022 12:07:59 GMT
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I'm not a massive fan of 'car channels' because alot are quite superficial and i find the car 'scene' in general pretty dire nowerdays. I did like 'throttle stop garage' a Canadian guy building a Volvo amazon but the outstanding thing is he makes half the bodywork from carbon fibre and goes into quite some detail which is somthing actually worth watching. His other vids about more mundane fabrication stuff is 50/50 for me.
In thay same vein Easy Composites have some great videos on that subject. I much prefer watching car related stuff without a car in sight!
Weasley Kagan is one I found recently too. Building his own 'free valve' engine. Again car stuff but on a whole other level to the usual car dross.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 18, 2022 11:39:55 GMT
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To be honest I'm not sure but I'd think normal polyester filler will do. It's nice and flexible as they go so should deal with expansion etc. Only other thing I can think of using is some kind of chemical metal.
I'd use a modern epoxy primer myself.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Shocking HT leads!?slater
@slater
Club Retro Rides Member 78
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Jan 18, 2022 11:36:03 GMT
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I'd say it entirely normal. Especially if your pulling the lead off as your removing its usual route to ground and it will want to find another one! We have rubber gloves for doing this on the dyno and it even goes through (or more likely around) them!
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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What kind of electronics can you use ? I have a collection of old cpu's, ram chips, graphics cards etc that I'm reluctant to scrap if they could be of use to someone. Basically anything electronic is worth saving. If it uses IC chips it's going to have gold in it. Generally the older the better. The really lucrative stuff is 90s or older which is obviously hard to come by nowerdays tho. As you get newer they came up with ways of using less metals and cutting costs. I'm always grateful for any donations really but to buy stuff you generally need to have collected a decent quantity. For example I buy ram sticks by the kilo at around £20 per kg so it takes a fair number of computers to get 20quids worth and then you loose 1/4 of the value posting them. The ceramic cpus however can sometimes be worth £5 each or more so even one can be worth sending. Some people prefer to semi process the circuit boards themselves. For example you can cut off the gold fingers from boards and sell them for more like £100 per kg. Again tho. Its alot of PCs for 1kg of fingers. Alot of the stuff I process comes from more industrial electronics like old telephone exchange racks or long redundant PLC systems. It's more likely somones going to stumble across an old system like that that's going to be scrapped at work and save the boards out of it for me. In some instances il do what they call a 'toll refine' where I basically do it for a fee plus a percentage of the yield and the client gets thier metal back when I'm done. One of my next projects is a machine to automate 'depopulating' motherboards and the like. Basically a big drum oven that they go in and get tumbled round under heat. The solder all melts and all the components fall off. The boards themselves can then be sold on to a copper refiner and I sort the components for stuff worth me further processing. I doubt il make much money out of it but one day it would be nice to get a kilo bar from old junk I've got for free!
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Hi, All very interesting. Is it time consuming or do you start the various processes off and leave them to it? Do you have difficulty getting the chemicals / acids? Do you have to be registered, for the want of a better word? Presumably you are discrete about this, documenting it on an open forum aside, because people might think you are an English Walter White. Sorry for all the questions, just curious being never really interested in chemistry at school. Colin Yeh good question. As it goes the Hydrochloric acid is readily available although I'm finding the price is shooting up and its harder to find people who will ship it in 25L drums. I used to pay £55 for a drum, last one was more like £75 and the company mislabeled it as TFR so the courier would take it! That said its for sale everywhere as brick acid its just usually even more overpriced than that and its usually diluted too which isnt an issue in itself but annoying if you need to ship it as your paying to ship a bunch of water around for no reason. The Sulphuric can be had as drain cleaner if you don't mind a few organic inhibitors in it or if you don't mind it diluted battery acid. If you want proper 98% reagent grade stuff in bulk then you have t go to a chemical supplier really and they are fussy who they sell to. Luckily you don't really need much of it until you start messing with electrolysis stuff. The real hard one to get is the Nitric Acid. Its a explosive precursor so comes under those anti terrorist rules. You cant really get it unless you go to a proper supplier and then usually they wont sell to you unless your a registered business. As long as you have a companies house number you are fine tho. All you have to do is fill out a deceleration of what you are doing with it and they will ship it to any business address. Luckily i know a friendly business who let me borrow their company number and address a few years ago and i ordered a 40L carboy that will last me for a while! Also to some extent its possible to recycle the nitric acid and also make it from other nitrates like sodium or potassium nitrate that are a bit easier to get (although still should be restricted i think). You can also make the aqua regia using these directly or even use slightly less effective oxidizers like hydrogen peroxide or even household bleach! The restrictions are effectively nothing more than an annoyance. They wont be stopping anyone getting anything tbh. Bureaucracy at its worse. Oh and yeh it is quite time consuming. That's really where the economics fall down and why we send all our junk to India for men on 50p a week to burn on open fires. There is a certain element of spending half hour on it then walking away and getting on with something else for an hour while it does its thing tho.
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Last Edit: Jan 18, 2022 7:35:50 GMT by slater
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 17, 2022 21:21:15 GMT
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So for those of you that have read my 'garage build' thread you will have seen that I've been building in a lab area and I thought it was probably an good idea to explain what I was using it for as it's not really the kind of thing 'car people' normally stick in the back of their garage.. It all started about 5 or 6 years ago. Myself and a few of my friends have been into various 'treasure hunting' hobbies for years (think metal detecting, bottle digging etc.) Around 2016 however we started heavily focusing on what we could find in the local rivers. ('Mudlarking' is the term some people use but there's not much mud in the brick bottomed rivers of Birmingham!) Anyway, we had found a number of items, mainly coins and jewelry that we suspected to be gold or silver but had no real idea how to test them. I started off by simply googling some info on what different acids etc would do to the various precious metals so I could work out what we had but before I knew it I was onto reading about metal refining and this all happened.. At first I started out just doing some experiments under the extraction in my spray booth but that proved not to be a particularly good idea as the fumes generated doing this are not only toxic but extremely corrosive too. I ended up building a makeshift lab in the old ladies toilet at the back of my workshop which I used for a number of years until I started to think about replacing it with an all singing all dancing professional setup. What really got me hooked was working out some of the more obscure places these metals can be found and quite how valuable a small amount can be.. I had an idea that things like electronic components or catalytic converters contained precious metals but don't think I really had a grasp of quite how much value was out there lurking. (this was pre cats being worth a fortune era!) Also being into exploring old derelict buildings. I've seen so many rooms stacked to the ceiling with old computers rotting away and just walked on by thinking it was all worthless but in reality there's value in all sorts of items from old x-ray film to road dirt! It's just coming up with a way to extract it economically... So I could write a whole book on this stuff (and people have) but i thought I'd put up a few photos of some of the more basic work and if people find it interesting I can maybe go into more detail. Refining can usually be achieved in one of three ways, either by dissolution and precipitation, smelting and cupulation, or by electrolysis. Each method has its pros and cons but in this case we're going to be looking dissolving and precipitating some gold from old ceramic CPUs as this is fairly simple Refining gold is actually quite easy compared to the other metals. The main problem is gold is very unreactive. Nearly all acids wont touch it and mercury and cyanide (that will) pose some obvious health hazards. Luckily for us, someone a long time ago realized that although hydrochloric and nitric acid on their own won't dissolve the gold a mixture of the two will. Therefore the first step is to cover the metals we want to refine with hydrochloric acid and heat the solution. Once hot we can add small doses of nitric acid and the reaction starts. The nitric acid oxides the gold and the gold oxide is able to react with the HCl and dissolve into solution as a satisfyingly gold coloured Auric Chloride. Most 'impurities' will dissolve too. You've got to have some fairly exotic metals in there to resist this 'aqua regia' solution as it is known. In the case of these CPUs they are mostly inert ceramic but the pins are made from an alloy known as 'kovar' which is mainly iron and nickel. Luckily these don't really cause us any problems. They simply dissolve into the solution along with the gold plating. Also it's not the obvious plating that we are really after with these . The majority of the gold is present in the brazing that is used to solder the ceramic integrated circuit to the ceramic body. This brazing is mainly an alloy of gold and silver, the gold will dissolve but the silver forms silver chloride which is insoluble and hangs around int he solution making it look very cloudy. The only other problem metal is tungsten which is present in some of the ceramic heat spreaders. This batch didn't have many of the type of cpus that have these spreaders but there was a few in there and the tungsten reacted to form a really bright yellow tungsten oxide which also hangs around undissolved and makes everything a powdery yellow.. Once all the metals are dissolved any excess of nitric acid must be eliminated. There is a number of methods of achieving that but I prefer to add a small amount of sulphamic acid. Also at this point it is good practice to add a few drops of sulphuric acid to precipitate out any lead that may have dissolved as a solid lead sulphate. The solution is filtered which should separate all these undissolved contaminates and just leave us with the liquids. We are now left with a solution containing our gold but also lots of iron, nickle and probably a bit of copper and even some bonus platinum. Luckily there is a way to selectively precipitate out the gold using sulpher dioxide gas. This can be done by literally bubbling the gas through the solution but it can also be done more simply by adding sodium metabisulphite powder which reacts with the residual acid and creates the dioxide gas directly in the solution. For reasons i don't quite understand this gas pretty much only precipitates the gold. Even the platinum which really doesn't like being in solution stays put allowing almost metallic gold to collect on the bottom of the beaker. The last step is another filtration to catch the gold powder and a repeat of the process to ensure all the various contaminates are removed before the gold can be melted and if everything is don't right is essentially 24k 999 pure. There are some stumbling blocks but overall its quite simple once you've done it a few times. [/font]
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Last Edit: Jan 17, 2022 21:41:10 GMT by slater
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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drill bitsslater
@slater
Club Retro Rides Member 78
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Jan 12, 2022 11:59:42 GMT
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Just buy a proper brand like dormer or presto and you cant go far wrong. I'd avoid pricey sets with fancy coatings or alloys unless you have a special job for them.
Theres no real benefit in buying coated drills for jobbing work. It's a gimmick that's come from the cnc machining world where cutting tools are used in a very controlled way and the coating can extend tool life. In a battery drill you will just wear through it straight away!
Cobalt alloys and the like can be a bit better for stainless and titanium but again I'd save them for controlled use in a drill press at least rather than forking out extra to use in a hand drill.
For 99% of work I'd just use bog standard phospated (black) HSS jobber bits.
Dormer do a great 1-6mm set btw. Think it's a 413 set. It's basically all the sizes that will get lost and broken and you don't have a spare from the last set you bought. I always keep a couple of fresh sets around.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Jan 10, 2022 14:31:30 GMT
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The relevant facebook group if you know what it's worth and ebay auction if you don't.
I have dabbled with car and classic and what not with no negative effects other than few rogue phone calls about cars I sold 15 years ago but theres nothing like seeing a post on facebook to temp people into parting with their cash.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Buying an Impact Wrench?slater
@slater
Club Retro Rides Member 78
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If you have 18v Bosch batteries already it makes sense to stick with bosch. don't touch the 180nm thing you have linked tho. That's just not powerful enough to be of much use for anything other than screw!
I run bosch 18v tools and have a GDS18 V-300 which is a capable midrange unit. (Think anything up to M12 or so.) It's not up to doing crank bolts or wheel nuts, that's for the full size machines which are probably out of your price range but full sized impacts are a bit bulky for most uses anyway so the midrange is still a good tool.
If you don't want to go with bosch them Milwaukee is the way to go. It's really not worth wasting money on lesser brands and budget options. Once you have Milwaukee batterys your laughing. Thier stubby impact would be a great investment.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Dec 13, 2021 15:43:19 GMT
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If you're going to paint over it then gravitex. If your not then raptor. You can tint the raptor to body colour if you want.
Raptor is closer to the 80s rubbery underseal stuff they put on at the factory but I'm not too sure about painting over it. It might be fine might not!
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Dec 10, 2021 14:29:08 GMT
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Yeh I think you misunderstand the arrangement with those kind of setups. Its mates sharing a unit essentially. It's all based on trust..
Which why I would never do it 😉
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Painting over hydrate 80slater
@slater
Club Retro Rides Member 78
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Yeh thats what it's supposed to do. It encapsulates the rust as well as treating it. If youre going to sand over the top of it save some money and use straight phosphoric acid.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Cheap bandsaw. Probably cost you less than the blades/discs you would use! Get the right tool for the job imo.
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