DIY Electrolic De-Rustification


Electrolic de-rustification (I made up the name!) is the reverse of plating. In this case you are reducing the iron oxide (rust) into iron and oxygen. It is very simple and gives good results. You need:

battery charger

El-cheapo battery charger

sink

$2 garage sale stainless steel sink and new clean mixture

arm and hammer washing soda

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You fill the sink up to about 2" from the top with water. Add 1 tablespoon washing soda (NOT baking soda) for each gallon of water. Place the part in the sink and use plastic insulators so that the part does physically touch the sides of the sink. There should be at least 1" between the part and any part of the sink (as I found out). Attach the positive lead of the battery charger to the sink and the negative lead to the part to be de-rustified. You should measure about 1 to 3 amps of charging current at the start and rising to about 4 to 5 amps.

Initialy, the solution will be clear but pretty soon, it'll start bubbling and foam will appear as in the above picture. The current will rise steadily also. If it rises above 5 amps, you may have too much washing soda in the mixture. Drain and start over again.

I've had the best success when I've left the piece in the soup overnight. The rust turns into a sludge that can be wiped or scraped off. You should clean and dry it as quickly as possible as the sludge turns rockhard quickly and the piece rusts quickly. I use paper towels and my shop air hose to dry them. There's a slight dusty residual that's left on the piece but it easily sands or wire brushes off. By the way, the piece will change to a dark color or black.

soup

Here's the soup after a week of use - pretty digusting

before

Headlight bucket with 50 years of crud on it immediately after being pulled from the soup

I tried one of my 1954 headlight buckets and left 50 years of crud on it. I didn't even take the caked on dirt, screws, rusted on rubber gasket or plastic adjustment nuts off. Threw it in the de-rustifier and let it sit overnight. Well, the results were outstanding. The rust either flaked off or rubbed off as a kind of sludge. The rubber gasket that was rusted in place pulled off easily.

after

Here's the headlight bucket after cleaning the sludge off, drying and a quick wirebrushing

cleaned and painted exhaust

Exhaust manifold after cleaning and painting - looks pretty damn good!

I did a test and put one exhaust manifold through the process and did the other one by normal wirebrushing and sand blasting. The de-rustified one required much less work overall, less time and was way easier to bring up to a better condition than the other. I highly recommend this method.


Things to know before you start

You probably know by know that I learn a lot of things the hard way. Electrolic de-rustification was no exception. Here's a list of things that will help make the process easier: