[Sca-cooks] Cleaning metal

[Susan Fox]

Thank you!  I have a cast iron mold with hearts that I would like to be 
able to use or at least to display.

My contractor left a piece of rebar... I may snag that for my anode, 
there's a LOT of rust on this puppeh.

Selene

Saint Phlip wrote:
> All you do is make a salt water solution. Easiest way is to heat up
> the water in a large pot on the stove, and keep adding salt until it
> won't dissolve any more, let it cool, and pour the salty water into a
> large bucket or other container.
>
> Then, you take the pieve of metal you want cleaned and attach it to
> the negative clip on the battery charger, and a "sacrificial" piece of
> steel (can be anything- a large nail?) to the other terminal, and
> place both into the salty water, keeping as much distance as you can
> between them- at least a few inches. Plug the charger in (you didn't
> do this with the charger p[lugged in, "I trust?) and turn it onto
> trickle charge and leave it alone for a few hours. After that time,
> you should see the sacrificial piece getting stuff all over it, and,
> depending on how rusty the work piece is, it should be cleaning up. If
> the sacrificial piece starts looking clean, and the workpiece rustier,
> you switched the terminals somehow, and you need to swap them in the
> other direction (I have about a 50 50 chance of getting this right
> because I can never remember which is which). Just leave it alone
> until your work piece is as unrusty as you want it, shut it down, and
> rinse the workpiece in hot water, then season it, if that's what you
> intend to do.
>
> Now, if you're talking cookware, and it was REALLY rusty, there may be
> some pitting in the metal. Seasoning, seasoning, and reseasoning will
> eventually give you a smooth surface, but until the seasoning takes,
> there's not much else you can do because it's the rust that ate those
> pits out, not the treatment.
>
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:24 PM, Susan Fox <selene at earthlink.net> wrote:
>   
>> Um, yeah.  I just moved into a new house which is blissfully ant-free, I'm
>> not all that keen to try this method.
>> I would like a pointer to the one with the battery charger however.
>>
>> Selene