They look at ya kinda wierd when you buy 15 gallons of vinegar at Wal-mart...

At least that is what my wife told me when I asked her to pick it up for me , at $2.07 a gallon , plus a $10.00 metal 15 gallon drum , I now have a $40.00 de-rust tank!!! , I hope this works as good as I have been reading , I started off by placeing my frozen /rusted solid '57 hood hinges that I got off of a "in the woods" find , and the fan off of the motor in the same find , I guess I'll find out in a couple of days how it's gonna do , anyone have any idea how long I'm supposed to leave the parts in this stuff? , here's some pics...

 

It doesn't take long.....a few days depending on how rusty....just check it often....

 

I used to use this method on de-rusting old cast iron Dutch ovens. It worked good but I would usualy let them sit in the solution for a good week.

 

I'll have to try this on my cast iron, I had it clean and my dumb stepdaughter and useless husband rusted it right back up

 

If you were in New Mexico, the Walmart folks would have called the cops thinking you were somehow making meth. Haha.

 

That's why you buy it in bulk at Sam's

 

Hahaha!!!!

I need to throw my exhaust manifolds in a bucket of vinegar so I can take them to the chromer. The insides are rusty!

 

how clean does the cast iron come out? sandblast clean?

 

good luck, looking 4ward to see how it turns out. Never tried it that way b4

 

Has anyone mixed Vinegar and Molasses ?

 

Molasses is delicious on it's own, I think vinegar would make it taste weird

 

leave it in for about 4 days, the metal cleans off to nice pretty bare metal, i had to scrub a little with an sos pad but the parts came out clean, oh and DO NOT PUT POT METAL IN VINEGAR , trust me it will disintegrate the part, i did not know, now i do, does anyone have a 53-54 chevy gauge cluster bezel?

 

I have been doing it for awhile,seems like a week is good.

 

Thats why you tell them you sell hand made douches at the local farmers market!

 

After you take the parts out of the vinegar they will likely be covered in a black substance. This washes off but wear gloves because it will stick to your hands like crazy and doesn't want wash off easily. On parts I did, I buffed them off with a wire wheel in my bench grinder once they were dry and the metal actually ended up with a shiny appearance, not like chrome but a long ways from the mess I started with. The parts will rust really fast once they're cleaned off so be prepared to spray with oil or paint them right away. I think a week should be about right for those hinges.

 

At 48 hours I used a rag to wipe, and set it back in for another 24 hours. Then took it out, wiped it again, and called it good. That was on an 8BA head and thermostat housing. Worked great. I could've left them in longer, but this was just an experiment.

 

Vinegar seems to soften cast iron. I don't use it to take the rust off manifolds or other cast iron parts. It doesn work great for steel, however.

 

I left a rusty hood latch in for about a week. Was some ugly lookin
black stuff floating on top of the liquid at the end. Need to rinse off
immediately. CAn do some additional cleanup if needed with a wire
wheel or whatever.

 

can't wait to see how this turns out.... with pictures of course, before and after

 

Any acid will ruin springs.

 

That stuff works great on hard water stains and it gets the green stuff off of copper. It's like a really cheap bottle of CLR .

 

Is this a safe process to use on cast iron exhaust manifolds of will they be damaged?

 

I pulled a few old tools today that had soaked for a week to remove some rust in a 5% vinegar solution and it certainly did the trick. I'm curious if anyone has tried the vinegar with some type of heat, like an old soak vat, but instad of caustic soda using vinegar? When I was in the auto machine shop business I built what I called crankshaft vats that we put caustic soda and the water mixture in but we did'nt heat them and it would clean them after a couple days but if we put the crank in the hot vat it would clean one in a matter of hours. We only used the crank vats if the other vats were full. You know the old saying poor folks got poor ways, well when I first started in the business I had no money so I built my first vat out of a 55 gallon drum and a burner out of a piece of 6" diameter pipe with plate welded on top and bottom with holes drilled in the top for the burner and drilled and tapped the side of the pipe and ran a piece of black pipe to a piece of copper tube and ran that to the gas outlet. It was touch and go lighting that deal, to say the least.
I'm thinking a small vat with a lid to help retain the heat and a small more effecient burner with the 5% vinegar solution would certainly speed up the process. It would need to be set outside or the vinegar smell would drive you out of the shop. Anyone tried heat with vinegar?

408

 

Why don't you guys try throwing in a few into the vat. You can call it Rusty Pickled Eggs. Break out the keystone

 

Several years ago I started a thread on using vinegar to derust parts.

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=95404&highlight=vinegar

The only thing that I do that is different today is after blasting the rust off with a hose, I wash the parts with soap (I just use dish soap) and water. That's all you have to do to stop them from flash rusting. Then dry them and they're good.

I've been using this as a derusting process for over 15 years, it works great.

 

Not that it really matter now , because I have already bought the distilled white vinegar , but , was it supposed to be apple cider vinegar , or does it matter at all?

 

I need 55 gallons of this ...

 

Yep!

 

Everything I've read on this subject says to use just plain old white vinegar. I use the cheapest stuff I can find and it works great. But I love malt vinegar on fries!

 

If you are doing this inside the garage (it's winter now you know) will the vapors rust other metal parts around the area? Other acid vapors will do this right?