Hi all
Been mega busy recently, working from home, doing garden stuff, trying to fix garage roof to keep leaks at bay, and just this last week or two I found the solution to my rusty car bits. I built an electrolysis tank to put the bits in to clean off the rust. Where did I get this idea? Well I do remember vaugely (I don't remember any other way!) seeing this about 10 years ago, but never thought much about it. Probably because I didn't understand it or how to build it, but it's really easy.
I watched a video on youtube someone doing it and 2 rainy sundays ago I got a storage box out the garage, got some scrap steel sheet for the sacrifical anode, a power supply from a laptop and some welding wire to get power. I put spade terminals with the little holes, and some lengthy wires, on the end of the laptop bullet connector and taped it up, which the welding wire would then go through to create the connections. Drill a hole in the sheet metal, wrap the wire round that and connect up the other wire.
Firstly I put in the back brakeplates, one at a time, and done it for about 10 hours each, results were quite amazing, the rust just washes off to leave the metal that hasn't been eaten away, luckily only a fewpin holes on one of the plates, but good enough to clean and paint with primer, top coat will be later. I then hung the strut top cups, the rear bumper bracket and the little rear roll bar securings into the solution from a strip of wood and some welding wire, tied the wire all together and then connected up the Power.
Again results were really good, and the great thing is you do not need to do any labourious sanding/grinding etc. when you then discover half the rust is still embedded into the little pores.
I've now graduated onto using my blue big as a container to put the axle in and am currently finishing off the other side, the axle will only sit up long ways in the bin, so I filled it half way with water as it would otherwise to be too heavy to empty when finished, plus i'm doing half a side at a time anyway, so it made sense.
You put bicarbonate of soda in the water to make it more conductive, I had about 1.5 amps going through it and at 20v, obviously the sacrifical anode and car part should not be physically touching, nor have the positive onto the anode as the car part will rust instead.
Very interesting piece of kit, not complicated, and easy to put together yourself. Here's a few videos of it working the first time I done it.
You can see the little streams of bubbles from the edge of the plate starting:
https://andrew-cars.s3.eu-west-2.amazon ... Bath_1.mp4
THen after an hour or so it starts going like this:
https://andrew-cars.s3.eu-west-2.amazon ... Bath_2.mp4
Then after 3 or 4 hours you get all the scum on top that is the rust coming off the part:
https://andrew-cars.s3.eu-west-2.amazon ... Bath_3.mp4
And some of the results from after it:
I'm chuffed with the results, and judging by the axle a lot of the rust is loose and will just flake off when I clean it down. you can see the rough bits where the rust has eaten into, this all just falls off, there is also a few wee pinholes if you look closely but nothing major.