The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area General Truck Talk I Gotta give this Report on d-Rust-It'

I feel it only fair after all the time and money that I have spent on this stuff
that I give ya all a heads up on this stuff. Just so you don't get stiffed like I did.
$70 bucks for 1 gallon of concentrate makes 10 gallons of liquid and another $40 for heaters to get it up to around 120.
This worked great when I first mixed it up but after one differential cover two AD door inspection covers, two brake cylinders and a master cylinder that was it, all done, finished bout all petered out! That's pretty expensive de-rusting.
I've been working on a couple of AD radios and have had them in the solution at 120-130 for a couple of days and it taint even touching the rust. I ended up spending a half hour in front of the fine wire brush for all the parts and that did it.

I have been a staunch hold out on the electrolysis method all this year but I fear that I'm going to have to throw in the towel join the ranks and say uncle to my d-Rust-It tank. Guess I'll have to give the battery charger some exercise. One good thing though, I already have a tank and heater! Now I gotta go dig out all those articles and figure out what chems are the best, seems someone mentioned a pool supply?

Anyway, point is, don't believe all the claims you hear about de-rusting products.

Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Denny,

I bought some 'Washing Soda' from my local Wally World for about $ 5.00. I don't think that you can find a less expensive option out there.

Mix it up as per the directions and hook it up. Mine worked very well for a number of suspension components.

Lane

Denny come over to our side! All the cool kids are doing it! Dont you want to be like all of us!

I bought my washing soda here.

Or order 60 pounds!

I bought a few boxes and have only used 1 full box in a 32 gallon garbage can. The solution looks disgusting but keeps doing its thing. Just make sure to clean off your scrap metal once in awhile. I have a 2' section of torque tube in mine and it looks like its been in salt water for 20 years.

Ive been using a little dinky charger, the best advice I can give is to surround the piece to be derusted with scrap metal. In my garbage can Ive got scrap steel spaced about every 6-8" and wired together above the solution.

Let us know how it goes!

Denny - Go to Farm-Fleet (or Fleet-Farm), pick up PH-up in the pool section. Cheapest local soda ash source there is. FWIW, I used muriatic acid in my acid bath

Hope this helps

Scott

Scott the problem with using acid is it will eat bad metal as well as good metal. Electrolysis wont touch good metal, period.

Archaeologists use the electrolytic method when trying to preserve rusted relics they drag off the ocean floor.

It has worked good for me with my smaller parts. I need a bigger charger for my larger parts, but went from RUST to THIS .

Kind of like finally having to vote for the Democrats Jeff, yep I’m afraid I’m going to have to switch sides. I talked with the formulator and really didn’t get much satisfaction or information from him on this bath so I think it’s just a scam.
I don’t intend on dipping a fender or anything that big. When I get to that size I think I’ll leave it up to some one with the proper equipment. I just want a ten or fifteen gallon dip.

I haven’t been able to put my finger on exactly what’s bugging me about the electrolysis but I think one of the things is all the pictures I’ve seen look like all your doing is converting the rust to a “black something”. Then you have to physically try to remove the black something by wire brushing, sanding, sandblasting or just painting over it. Navel Jelly will do that.
Truckernix, up in Canada posted some pictures a while back of his doors. He had a commercial chemical stripper do them and they look like brand new metal, no paint, no rust and no “black something”, just plane old clean metal. That’s what I have in mind.
The d-Rust-It that I was using left a very thin black smut or soot when you took it out of the bath, but a light scrubbing with detergent in the laundry tub produced a clean metal surface, it did remove the rusted metal completely. The only problem is it only lasted for a few parts before it crapped out on me and cost a bunch.
Alan, from the buffed appearance of the few parts that I saw in your album it looks like you’ve wire brushed them after you stripped them. I have dial up so I can’t look at all the pics or I’d be there all day so maybe I’m missing something?

And Scott, I gotta hand it to ya, that’s one big dip tank ya got there. I really get the creeps about using acid and especially about storing a large tub of it in the shop for occasional use. If your Mylar plastic tub springs a leak you gonna’ have one hell of a mess to try and clean up. And as I said before, on these parts I really didn’t want to strip the plating off, 90% of it is intact, there is only rust on the outside top of the case.

Ya see, in my mind each one of these methods has it’s bad side to it. The d-Rust-It was the least toxic and easiest to use if only it didn’t cost so much and also if it lasted longer.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Your Tru-Value hardaware store stocks quite an assortment of chemicals you can't find at Walmart or the big home stores. Like TSP in powder form, muratic acid, washing soda, and more.

I just used a rubermaid tote with some baking soda and it has worked quite well for small parts. Go for it!

Welcome to the club!

Electrolysis has been used to restore ancient metal artifacts, armory and weapons for museums and collections since electricity was discovered.

Very important not to devalue unique priceless pieces of art and treasures that have thousands of years of corrosion....

That endorsement did it for me, when I first heard about it in school, many moons ago.
I forgot all about it until I started to look around for simple derusting methods for my truck restoration on the internet.
...of course AFTER an afternoon of power brushing my old single manifolds I used to have.

- It sometimes takes a little frustration to appreciate what SIMPLE really means.

Vinegar, molasses, cola and citric acid also work well for small (or too large) parts, albeit slow.

Hey Denny,

I'm really pleased with the results of electrolytic rust removal. It's cheap, effective and safe. I just cleaned a few brackets and a valve cover. After I took them out I hit them with a wire brush and voila! Clean metal!

Denny (Rustednuts too)

I went weak solution on the Muriatic acid to minimize any good metal from being eaten. Actually half as weak as you would go cleaning your driveway. Rust ate more than the few days in Acid did on my parts. Thought of the electrolysis method, however could not find a large enough electrode for what I needed.

Was going to have the parts sand-blasted, however $50 for paint remover, plastic, stock tank heater and acid vs $100 for blasting was a no brainer. I then neutralized the acid prior to disposal with a tub of soda ash for $6

I will have my cab blasted along with the frame as they are too big to do myself.

Either way, good luck with your rust removal.

Scott

Denny my understanding is that the black residue is magnetite.

Which can for the most part be scrubbed off with a little work or the part can be dipped in some type of phosphoric acid used to clean metal, to remove it. Either way I havent noticed any problems with painting right over it.

An issue to consider is heating the part after tanking as steel is fairly porous and will wick up water. I use my propane torch slowly so as not to warp anything, but I imagine a little bit of time in a warm oven would do the trick as well. Also expect a small amount of flash rust once the part is completly dried. But the small amount is usually so small it can be ignored, or as said, use the phosphoric acid dip.

Im a bit of an obsessive-compulsive person, and when it comes to working on my vehicles and can understand your apprehension when working on something new due to the mixed reviews. My opinion is if there is a bad review someone didnt do it right.

If it wasnt an ideal process do you think Scientists and archaeologists would use it to preserve artifacts?

The nice part is it is an almost instantaneous process and you can see it working immediately, as the hydrogen bubbles come of the part being cleaned. I was real skeptical at first, but Im already considering getting a large farm tank at some point to do whole doors and fenders and using a small welder for the power supply.

Im trying my hardest to pressure you into trying it, is it working yet?

Once you decide please let us know how it goes! Good luck, Jeff

I just ran en experiment and put a rusted-to-death patch panel in a Tupperware bowl filled with vinegar. In two days of @50 degree weather, and a little coaxing from a pressure washer, I've got a perfectly clean and shiny piece of metal.

Yea, yea, I know it's supposed to eat good metal but I didn't see any evidence of that on my test piece. Maybe if I left it out in the sun for a week or two things would be different but from my experiment I think concern over vinegar eating metal is much ado over nothing, especially when talking about the thick steel found on AD truck parts.

I'm going out to Home Depot for some 1x8's and visqueen to make a quickie pool and derust my doors inside and out, then slosh around some baking soda solution inside after a good rinsing, POR-15 the insides after they dry and I'll have a pair of beautiful bare-metal doors for a couple bucks worth of commonly available stuff that works while I sleep.

Just call me The Vinegar Advocate

... and it's STOVEBOLT.COM APPROVED!

Jeff - usually called 'black oxide', like in the gun blueing process, rather than magnetite ... as opposed to red oxide, which is the rust

and Denny - note that nothing you do to remove the rust from the radio cases will restore the cad plating, the resulting clean steel patches will still require painting with something to prevent re-rusting .... I've used cold galvanize spray zinc to touch up cad plated things more or less inconspicuously

Bill

and Woody - as someone who makes real vinegar, I can suggest you spend a LOT of time rinsing all the pinch weld joints well, maybe even flush with some metal prep [phosphoric acid], or you'll find vinegar not only works while you sleep, but works thru your new paint job

Sorry Denny, I didn't make my response very clear. I have gone both routes, De-Rust-It and electrolysis. Both have worked good for me, but I too find De-Rust-It expensive and wears out quickly. The photos of the vent cover were done with electrolysis. I cooked them for 2-3 hours with a 2 amp charger. Took them out & wire brushed them, which only took a few minutes, then washed with cool water & towel dried. Total cost:almost $0. A better charger with a little more power will do a better job. One other reason I like the electrolysis is the water/soda can be poured out. The black goop left from De-Rust-It I have to find a place to get rid of it. Where I live the waste department won't take it & I have no place to dispose of it.

Yeer getting thar! I was at Mainards the other day and walked past some of those live stock tanks. Your can get some really big tanks for not to much money.
And no. I'm not gonna paint over what was once rust. That's not the results that I'm looking for.
How bout we call ya Pickle for short Woody???
Yo Bill, ya mean there taint no cad plating under that rust??? Boy what a gyp, here I thought that the cad was supposed to protect the steel for ever! Yeah, right!
What I'm doing for now is power wire brushing the rusted areas and I'm shooting the bare spots with a good heavy coat of something made by Plastikote Co. called Bumper Chrome and just dusting the cad to blend it. I'll post some pics of the progress as I finish them up.
Now according to the de-Rust-It literature you can just flush it down the drain. That it was environmentally friendly was another reason I tried it.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Someone mentioned molasses. I have seen it work though never done it myself. you have to use animal feed grade molasses because you need to have the natual sulfur in it. You mix it 10-1 with water and drop in your part and walk away. The beauty of this method is that it takes the rust and paint off and is not toxic to the environment. After the effect wears off, (probably a dozen or more uses) you can just dump it. Feed molasses is pretty cheap too.

I was sold on the results of the vinegar method:
http://www.stovebolt.com/techtips/rust/vinegar/index.htm
It was especially good with odd shaped parts that were difficult to brush since the rust could be just blown off with water. A quick coating of phosphoric acid gives it that grey new steel look.

I did get it on my garage floor and it took the outermost smooth layer of the conrete off. I definitly recommend washing the area with baking soda right away.

It was that effect on my garage that led me to experiment with the electrolisys. I put some parts in a rubber tub with 20 mule team borax. I wrapped 110 volt copper electrical wire around the part and connected that to the negative clamp of a battery charger (to keep the clamp out of the solution). I clamped the other end to some re-bar and leaned it half in and half out of the solution. It took about two weeks, day and night, to turn black and I wasn't sure when it was done because of the black coating.

Maybe I should have clamped the battery charger directly to the parts and scrap submerged in the solution. Would that eat up the copper clamps on the charger? After that week I went back to vinegar and tried to be more careful about how I spilled it.

AusTex Im not sure Borax is appropriate o use for this???

Copper in the solution will do weird things also, but shouldnt hurt the solution. It wont hurt the part (cathode, negative) or the clamp if its under the solution at all, but if you have the clamp under the solution on the scrap piece (anode, positive) it WILL flat eat it up!

I use vice grips on the good part most of the time, it keeps a good tight bond between the part and the chargers cable. Using multiple anodes to surround the part is a good idea since its basically a line of sight process with the electrical current, therefore if its only on one side, chances are pretty good it wont do much to the other side.

Hope that helps.

Jeff