54 ■ POPULAR WOODWORKING
Shop Skills
8 Submerged in vinegar.
9 A baking soda bath neutralizes
the acid.
10 A fi nal rinse.
11 Supplies for making your own
citric acid.89 10
that they only work on the rust, and
that you don’t have to worry about
neutralizing acid residues possibly
left on the surfaces after the removal
process. You just need to wash with
water and dry the objects.
Vinegar
Regular 5% vinegar (the food-grade
type you buy at the grocery store) is
probably the cheapest and the most
available means for removing rust.
Instead of 5% vinegar you can use
stronger 20% vinegar. You won’t
fi nd 20% vinegar at the grocery. It’s
usually sold in home improvement
stores and online. Using 20% vin-
egar gives you the same results as
food-grade vinegar, but faster.
Fill a plastic or glass container
with vinegar, then submerge the
object and let the vinegar do its job.
Check the de-rusting progress and
scrape loose rust off with a brass
or steel brush or use steel wool
or an abrasive pad. Mechanically
removing the loose rust encourages
the chemical reaction to access the
remaining surface rust.
After a few hours of immer-
sion, check the progression of the
de-rusting process and remove
additional loose rust with a stiff
brush, steel wool, picks, hooks or a
scraper. Then immerse the object
again as necessary.
When the vinegar has aff ected
most of the rust, buff off the black
patina that formed on the metal
during the process using a cloth or a
very fi ne polishing media (very fi ne
steel wool can work too).
After the metal is free of corro-
sion, rinse it with water and neutral-ize the acidic vinegar in a solution
of a baking soda and water. One
teaspoon per cup of water is fi ne.
Give the hardware a fi nal rinse in
water again, and then dry immedi-
ately —you’d be surprised just how
quickly rust can re-form on damp,
bare metal. You can use paper tow-
els followed by an air blower (or hair
dryer) and when that is done apply
a protective coat to the surface such
as gun blue, wax, paint, or lacquer to
prevent rust from reoccurring.Citric Acid
You can make your own citric acid
from a powder available online and
in some stores. I dilute one volume11