A Rust Eating Brew

Wheels unearthed after twenty five (or more) years 

Page Five: A Battery Charger and Rusty Wheels

Before the Brew

Cleaning wire wheels sucks!  It takes forEVER and it hurts!  My 1962 Corvair Spyder convertible sported some spiffy Kelsey Hayes wire wheels.  They were classy.  They were gorgeous.  They were chromed.  They were also three kinds of hell to clean, what with all the fiddly nooks and crannies!

Alphie’s wheels, presently, are shabby, sad and rusty, with bent and missing spokes and a bit of curb rash, and are generally, in bad nick, BUT they are NOT chromed!  Which means I can use Electrolysis to clean them!
(See my Rust Removal with Electrolysis how-to sheet on the right side bar for more details of what you need and how to make your own rust eating brew.)

Before the Brew Two

But First:  We’ll take on each wheel one at a time, but first we must get as much of the dirt and mud off as possible.  We’ll hit it with some Simple Green, a pressure washer and some elbow grease.  The splines have decades of grease pasted on which will need to come off.  Grease is good because it prevents the wheel from rusting to the hub, but it also keeps the electrolysis from working on any area it touches.

My Rust-Eating Witch’s Brew:

For the uninitiated, electrolysis is a method of removing rust without affecting the underlying metal.  Electrolysis remove rust chemically, rather than abrasively, so that the underlying metal – or what remains of it after rust has eaten away at it – is left intact.  Electrolysis wiggles its way into every little niggly-pain-in-the-ass, hidden-from-tool-and-toil area of a wire wheel, making it an AWESOME way to clean them!  No scraping or sanding! No hurting my little fingers!

Our cauldron must be non-conductive and large enough to drown a wheel.  We’ll throw in some Arm & Hammer Washing Soda (better than Baking Soda, more on that in a minute), 15 gallons of water, a couple of pieces of rebar (or some other sacrificial ferrous metal), a battery charger and an eerie incantation, “Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble..”

The Solution:  In our cauldron, a plastic tote, we throw a tablespoon of washing soda for each gallon of water and give it a goodly stir.  “The charm’s wound up!” (Another gratuitous Macbeth reference, forgive me.)  Water isn’t as electrically conductive as you may think, so it needs some help - that’s what the soda does.

Geeky Science Moment:  Washing Soda is sodium carbonate.  Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate.  Both will work in our witch’s brew, but sodium carbonate is slightly more alkaline than sodium bicarbonate so it munches rust with more appetite.  And since both are readily available at the grocery store, washing soda it is.  A little caution:  Sodium carbonate is alkaline enough to cause eye and skin damage so googles and gloves kids!

With electricity trickling through the solution, both sodas produce small amounts hydrogen gas at the positive lead.  Hydrogen gas is explosively flammable in high enough concentrations, so we’re doing this outside with TONS of ventilation.  (Remember the Hindenburg?  It was filled with hydrogen gas because the US wasn’t so keen on selling helium to Adolph Hitler in 1937.  BOOM, “Oh the Humanity!”  Yeah, there will be none of that!)

The Cauldron and the Brew

The Setup:  We copper-wire together several pieces of rebar and toss them in the brew.  We suspend the rusty wheel in the solution so that it neither touches the sides of the cauldron nor the pieces of rebar.  We connect (AND DO NOT GET THIS BACKWARDS) the POSITIVE lead to the pieces of rebar (now called the ANODES) and the NEGATIVE lead to the wusty-wire-wheel (now called the CATHODE).  (Check out the diagram in my How-To sheet on the right side bar.)

ZAP It!:  We set the battery charger to 12 volts, plug it in and let it bubble away for as long as it takes to eat up all the rust.  We’ll check it after 24 hours, but it may require tossing the old brew and mixing up a fresh batch and more bubbling.  When we’re done, the rust will transfer from the wheel to the pieces of rebar - MAGIC!

Bright and Shiny Wire Wheels for Alphie

After 24 hour of Boiling in the Brew

Once out of the brew, the wheel (should) be rust-free but not sos in shiny; in fact, it will be gooey with dead rust.  More pressure washing, more scrubbing, maybe even some bead blasting, not to mention some spoke tightening, maybe some spoke replacing – one of the wheels is missing four spokes – and some wheel truing before it’s ready for powder coating.

Powder Coating:  Dur, Obvs, we’re going to powder coat the wheels!  Eastwood sells some powder that matches the gray Sunbeam painted the wheels.  (Actually, Sunbeam didn’t paint them at all.  They sourced their wire wheels from Motor Wheel Service (MWS) who supplied wheels to other British manufacturers.  So Alphie’s shoes are generic British trainers, sorta.)  With all the work that goes into restoring wire wheels, we shall not abide rust where spoke meets rim, at rim edges or where rocks nick paint.  OK, so rocks can nick powder coating too, but the rocks will have to put in more effort.

After 36 hours in the Cauldron

We’ll also use the electrolysis cauldron to remove rust from just about anything big or particularly rusty like the drive shaft, brake parts, brackets and assorted bits.

After 36 hours of Rust Munchin'!

Close Up:  After 60 hours in the brew and a few seconds with a wire brush!

BTW, it's still in the soup.  I'll add some more pictures after 48 hou

rs.  It may take a long time; there's a lot of rust to munch!
Sixty Hour Update:

I left it in the brew for 60 hours and when the bubbles slowed down to nearly nothing, I pulled it out and took a look.  I laid into the back of the rim with my grinder with a wire brush on it for only a few seconds, and as you can see, we hit clean metal!  

Another shot of the 60 hour rust munch

Not perfectly clean, but the rust is easily brushed off

ONE DOWN, FOUR MORE TO GO!

Update on the Update:  I threw the wheel back in the soup for another 48 hours.  Some of the spokes were still rusted to the threads in the nipples.

Oh and, I decided to completely dissassemble the wheels so that I can repair all the scratches and gouges on the hub and rims.  I'll have to finds some new spokes and nipples, but I will be able to get the wheel completely true.