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.

The Organ Donor

At peace in shady slumber

Page Four – The Organ Donor

Alphie meets Dr. Frankenstein:

The Alpine Project takes a new tack.

Defiling a grave

In my original Alpine plan (that had yet to meet reality), I, like a knight-errant sworn to his chivalric code, would gallantly perform shade-tree miracles to bring Alphie back to the glamour and romance circa 1965, wearing all her original sheet metal and accoutrements.  A glorious, noble and difficult task worthy of a dedicated champion, a True Restoration!  Yeah, so much for that.

From our first meeting, I could tell that Alphie had had some unskillful “work” done to her front end, but I had no idea how deep the wounds went until I carved inches and pounds of Bondo from her snoz.  Ignominy, anxiety, hand wringing and head scratching befell as the burden of my moral pledge began to weigh on me.

In February while we closing the Alphie deal, Clint offhandedly mentioned, “I have another Alpine at my sister’s house in Kentucky,” offering it as a freebie in the deal.  I didn’t seriously consider dragging home two rusty cadavers, but each chunk of Bondo chiseled from her flanks added another month or year to the build, not to mention mucho buckage to the budget.  So…

I emailed Clint saying, “about that Alpine in Kentucky,” more because of the rumpled snoz than her dangling rust.  He sent me some pictures, and I immediately kicked chivalry to curb, abandoned my moral quest and launched Operation Alpine Rescue to wrest the Organ Donor (the nickname she earned the day of her resurrection) from her premature grave.  All because the metalwork required to fix Alphie’s mashed nose rattled my mighty resolve.  Weakness and shame!  Moral conviction cowers to convenience and laziness as soon as reality landed its first blow! 

Alphie must suffer the same fate as Frankenstein’s monster, an amalgamated abomination, at least in the eyes of the purists!  

Operation Alpine Rescue becomes Operation Grave Robbery

Rudely yanked from her hole

Organ donors are usually - they tell me – dead.  Apparently, it hurts less that way.  Not to speak ill of the dead and I understand that the Donor is Clint’s high school car, but she has spent the last 20+ years squatting in a pasture under a tree, so her prognosis was doubtful from the get-go.  Since her tires exhaled, she has been lying with her belly against the ground, which, for rust prone cars like Sunbeam Alpines, is no bueno. 

She looked peaceful, quietly disintegrating in the shade of her tree.  But callously we invaded her repose.  We sawed down her protective saplings.  We drug farming equipment from her path.  We dug and tugged.  We huffed and puffed and finally, with the aid of a substantial 4X4 pickup, yanked the Donor out of her hole like a bad tooth.  It was a rude reintroduction to the world, and I felt a little embarrassed as if we had heedlessly thrown open the door of an occupied outhouse.

Disinterred!

On soft slanted ground, the Donor precariously teetered on two floor jacks where I swapped her wheels and flat tires for the set I looted from Alphie.  I pounded unyielding spinners, rocked gummed up splines from hubs, removed the right front brake caliper and banged the left rear brake drum with a small sledgehammer, ultimately getting three of the four wheels to roll.  The left rear wheel still stubbornly refuses to turn, but the Donor moved.

The Donor even with new shoes resists getting on the trailer

We lined up the trailer, and, with the help of a come along and my curiously rigged, jumper cable powered ATV winch in the bed of the truck, we wrestled the reluctant Donor onto the UHaul trailer rented especially for the job.  All that took more than three sweaty hours in the 90+-degree sun.  Thanks to Clint, his son Rubin and my brother-in-law Mark.  I did some of the work too – no judging!

All that rust is the frame of the car - the blue is the seat dangling where there is nothing.

Again, my first plan for The Donor was to restore her instead of Alphie because I liked her color combo better - Then I crawled under her to secure her derriere to the trailer.  Perhaps you have heard of Rusticles?  The Titanic has them – you know, rust that hangs down like icicles?

Once under the car, any thought of restoring the Donor evaporated like hope on a golf course.  I could see the broken main X shaped cross member hanging in rusty splendor from the crumbling remains of the floorboards.  In the old car hobby, that’s terminal, a fatality, a dead stop, the incontrovertible harbinger of death, even beyond the reaches of rat-rod zombiedom.  I solemnly pronounced her death and rejiggered my plans, again.

Or the (Latest) Modern Prometheus:

Alphie is a 1965 Alpine Series IV-A while the Organ Donor is a 1964 Alpine Series IV – essentially, the same model.  Both have 1592 cc four poppers and four speed trannies.  Alphie left the plant wearing a fully synchronized gearbox while the Donor’ sported a non-synchronized gear grinder.  Everything else, model wise, is the same.  In the dark of night using lightning and galvanization, Alphie will rise again as a cobbled together 1964 Alpine Series IV A.  She will be year older but will keep the benefits of her youth.

I will resurrect her as a Midnight Blue beauty of a 1964 Sunbeam Alpine Series IV with all the goodies of a 1965 series IV-A – The Best of Both!

Mixing DNA and a New Direction

The Drivetrain:  

From the two car-casses J, I will

v   - Excise the Donor’s entire front clip including the bonnet and inner wing wells

v   - Harvest the Donor’s engine block so the block number will match the body tag

v   - Amputate the Donor’s non-synchromesh tranny

v   - Transplant Alphie’s fully synchromesh tranny and

v   - Graft on the Donor’s overdrive unit and driveshaft - yeah, the Donor has overdrive, how cool is that! 

v   - Oh almost forgot, Swap the body tags– boom, number matching car!

The Color Palette:  Alphie is a stealth black car – Embassy black paint, black seats, black rubber floor mats, black dash, black door panels, black tires, just black, black, black-on-black! 

The Organ Donor is Midnight Blue with an Azure (sky) Blue seats and door panels with dark blue piping on the seats.  It has tattered scraps of red carpeting in it now, but the Azure Blue original will go back in it.  Me like those colors much gooder!

Shoes:  The Donor has 13-inch wire wheels, the shoes all Sunbeam Alpines trotted out of the factory wearing.  Someone upped Alphie’s shoes to size 14-inch, probably stolen from some other unsuspecting LBC (Little British Car, remember?) an MG, Triumph, Austin, Rover - who knows…

Other Stuff:  Whatever components are in better condition from either cadaver will one day return to the road!

Postmortem

The Organ Donor sits glumly under a tree in my front yard.  I have cleaned the leaf litter, twigs, rotted carpet and vinyl as well as pulled the seats out and removed a lot of old “stuff” from the trunk and interior.  Alas, the Donor must die so that Alphie may live.

Oh, and I collected many chiggers along the way! Yay!

Next post:  The Dissection

Show more pics!

The Grave Robbers and the Corpse

On the way to Frankenstein's Lab

Winched off the trailer back in Huntsville

A new spot under a new tree

Art picture:  Chic Patina!