How to Make Old Screws Shiny Again

This is a class 8 bolt, iv inches long, ane inch thick, made in the USA past Nucor Fastener.  Information technology has a tensile strength of 150,000 PSI -- well over twice the strength of a "common" grade 2 bolt with no markings on the head.  Information technology too has a history; those chisel marks on the head tell me a story of a long twenty-four hour period, a torch, a broken cheater bar, a cold chisel, a heavy hammer, a lot of cussing, and, finally, a talented mechanic who not simply knew how to break it loose, but had the self-command not to throw the miserable fuckin' affair as far as he could into the weeds when he finally got it out.  I never knew that guy, because I bought it from his manor auction, along with fifteen more than gallons of similar hardware. I don't know him, but I've known enough similar him, including my ain male parent.

In that location's some corrosion markings on the commodities head and some rough spots on the threads, that I couldn't encounter nether the original coating of rust.  Until I find and make clean a matching nut, I won't know for sure if the bolt all the same threads.  A purist might prefer a new one, just a man who needs a proficient hard class viii bolt this size might decide to make it work.  Especially considering that a new replacement of this grade/quality will cost you 15 bucks if you're buying in retail quantities.  At the tractor dealership, you would put in a new bolt and bill the client for tiptop-notch perfectionist piece of work.  In your own shop, well, information technology depends.

Anyhow, this is an quondam thread but the problem of majority hardware cleaning persists.  What actually got me thinking well-nigh information technology over again was the related problem of rusty tool restoration.  I didn't work in the store much during the pandemic, because the biggest risk of forced exposure to the virus where I am is/was a chance encounter with the cops in a traffic stop. None of those guys were wearing masks or respecting social distancing.  Then, until we got vaccinated, we weren't doing optional/frivolous driving errands, and the store I play in is ten minutes away.  Didn't matter and so much, because I wasn't doing garage sales either, so I didn't have the constant influx of "new" goodies to play with and clean upwardly.  Just now I practise again.

I never tried an electrolysis experiment similar we discussed higher in the thread.  No matter how you set it upwardly, y'all're generating potentially explosive gasses (oxygen and hydrogen) at the electrodes.  It's easy to ventilate the hazard down to nearly goose egg, only in/near a borrowed shop information technology'southward not my place to be creating even tiny risks that are avoidable.  And so that line of experimentation remains for when I get my ain shop space.

By chance I came beyond some videos of vibratory tumblers being used to clean rusty hardware.  This was #half-dozen on my listing of approaches in the original post final year:

Dan Boone wrote:
half dozen) Bulk vibratory abrasion methods.  Like to above but using a commercial vibratory cleaner vessel that just shakes, without tumbling.  Always with a purchased abrasive medium, sometimes with added liquid.  Noisy, usually requires an expensive purpose-congenital power tool, said to deliver pretty good results.

There's an well-nigh-standard vibratory tumblr out there that comes in two sizes (small and bigger) from a variety of sources; it looks to me similar in that location'southward ane adequately expensive made-in-USA product (from Eastwood) and a whole bunch of copycat versions made in Mainland china and sold at places like Harbor Freight.  All the copycats may exist from the aforementioned manufacturing plant with different brand names on them, as is common with Chinese-origin tools.  The quality is said to be lesser.

What I learned from my contempo spate of video-watching is that using these tumblers to make clean rusty parts requires some technique.  YouTube is full of unboxing-type videos where somebody gets the new toy, turns it on, dumps in the dry walnut-shell media (actually for polishing) that comes gratuitous with the unit, throws in some rusty bolts, runs it for a couple hours, pulls out the still-disappointingly-rusty bolts, and says some version of "well, they're amend, won't demand equally much fourth dimension on the wire wheel, I was hoping for more".

Then, too, a lot of those guys are restoring classic cars.  They don't but want "plenty rust removed then that the threads work again" -- they want mirror-polished bolts, every speck of rust and paint and original end removed, and then they tin send their hardware out to be electroplated.  Vibratory tumbling can get you lot a long distance closer to that, just my research suggests it can't get y'all all the style in that location.  You lot withal need a wire cycle or sandblasting step, and if y'all're gonna do that anyway, what did the tumbler really gain you?

Me, I just want all the crusty rust gone.  I don't exercise projects that depend on hardware with perfect finishes.

Despite all the disappointed-newbie videos, a few -- very few! -- store guys have videos that become farther, experimenting with dissimilar tumbling media and especially with calculation liquid (normally h2o) and soap (dish detergent or Simple Green most normally).    That makes the project a lot messier!  But dust-complimentary, so probably a lot safer.

The consensus seems to be that "the green media" -- basically, hard plastic triangles impregnated with mystery abrasives -- is the best stuff for rusty bolts/tools, but it has to be run moisture to be effective.  Downsides: the stuff is hideously expensive ($8-$10 per pound, and at the five-to-1 recommended ratio of media to dingy hardware, you need 12-15 pounds to do a total load in the bigger-size 18lb-capacity tumbler) and worse all the same, it's relatively soft, so information technology wears out fairly quickly.  (How many batches? Nobody volition quite say, but not all that many.)  This would non work for me; across the expense, I am put off by the wastefulness of it. I need a thrifty media or none of this makes sense for me.

The second-best proposition: "heavy media" such as ceramic triangles, cubes, and spheres, and/or tiny stainless steel pins (or former screws!) or good old-fashioned washed river gravel (some say, sand).  Always run wet, e'er run with soap.  Of course the stainless steel pins and fancy ceramic shapes are at to the lowest degree as expensive, when bought past the pound equally tumbling media, as the plastic pyramids.

Because the heavy media is heavy, yous tin't really put enough of it in an 18lb-chapters tumblr to physically fill information technology as much as is needful.  So there are dissimilar strategies for adding "bulking" media that is not so hard, but hard plenty to be useful, and much lighter per volume.  Modest hardwood shapes, a variety of plastic pellets, the glass beads used in sandblasting cabinets, even oddball stuff similar bone chunks or the footling cubes of tempered glass that yous go when you shatter a tempered-glass panel.

The deeper I got into the inquiry, the more I kept hearing that, for the specific project of rusty bolts and tools, variety in the tumbling media was the key, along with the soapy water.  Lots of different materials in all different sizes and shapes, the more than the merrier.  Every bit the softer items grind down into dust/mud, launder them out with lots of make clean water (a bucket and screen is suggested) and replace them with larger items, so y'all ever have a spectrum of size and varying textures.

And as for me?  I am garage-auction-man!  I can buy an endless amount of ugly ceramic tchotchkes for less than a dollar a pound, and do the world a favor by pounding them into "a multifariousness of sizes and shapes".  I tin "make" tempered-drinking glass cubes or pocket-sized hardwood shapes.  This was beginning to sound more promising.  (I could besides get endless pocket-size collections of plastic beads of diverse kinds for virtually no coin, but I'm really not interested in using plastic media; manufacturing a microplastics waste stream is not my idea of a socially-useful upcycling.)

So, subsequently all this research, I got it in my head that I really wouldn't mind trying out one of these vibratory tumblers.  And then serendipity! A side hustle paid off unexpectedly and I wound upwardly with a couple hundred actress bucks in my mad-money account.  Was gonna go to Harbor Freight but my amazing online-shopper spouse found a Chinese-branded version (almost certainly identical) on Amazon for xxx bucks less.  Took a week to get delivered, only it arrived yesterday:

So far, I don't take any "light" media.  And -- potential snag -- the instructions with my unit of measurement warn that using heavy media can "prematurely" wear out the plastic bowl.  Fairly warned, I am.  Only (a) basin replacements are readily available; and (b) I am pretty sure I can fabricate a better bowl out of a steel pot if the habiliment bug evidence as well severe.

For media, I did lodge two pounds of the expensive minor mix of ceramic shapes, just to become me started. Plus I had a four-pound jar of nicely washed and pre-sorted tiny river stones from, maybe, a big-box shop garden center.

As for ceramic tchotchkes, they come up in varying degrees of hardness; harder (porcelain) is better, whereas the thicker stuff is oft a softer stoneware with a good coat.  I'yard no good, but I spent lxx-5 cents last weekend at various garage sales picking out unloved and unlovable porcelain-looking ceramic items.  The chipped mug was the real heavy-porcelain deal; far harder than the buddha incense holder (?) or the swan candlestick, and rather difficult to smash upwardly.

All told, the media I threw in weighed near eight pounds, of my 18-lb weight budget.  Throw in a pint of h2o, I'one thousand at 9 pounds. 5 pounds of rusty junk leaves room for up to 4 pounds of lighter media one time I source some.  Click the moving-picture show if y'all want to see the rusty crusts in high-res horrifying celebrity:

So, as my mother's staff of life recipe begins, "into the basin, dump..."  It speedily became clear that the concrete finishing tool didn't actually fit; information technology was too big to become submerged in the limited volume of media.  So I took information technology right back out. Added the pint of water and a splash of Uncomplicated Green.  Started upward the unit.

This all happened today.  I ran the tumbler for ii hours.  Maybe 1 twenty-four hour period I'll exit it running unattended; it is noisy.  But as for at present, I don't trust it not to vibrate off its tabular array onto the floor, or not to disassemble itself from all the vibration.  So I settled for a 2 60 minutes exam.  It'south my expectation that really challenging items may need to go for 8-12 hours, but bolt threads might suffer and get peened over from a run and then long.  I needed to look within after two hours, for scientific discipline; and I needed to go domicile anyhow. Time to look:

And y'all know what?  My excessively rusty hardware is plain not done.  But the extent of rust removal, especially on the threaded items, is Amazing!  I am ridiculously pleased.   I really can't wait to see what longer runs exercise for some of those rustiest pieces.

I was too pleased that two hours was enough to take all the sharp edges off my porcelain shards, and so it was safety to rummage through the media with my hands to recollect my stuff.  I was non sure how long that would take.

There are several rinky-dink "features" to this tumbler.  It has a drain hose that has null at the within-the-basin cease of the plumbing equipment (similar a screen?) to keep small media from vibrating downwards into the drain hose and lodging against the clamp.  The main handwheels (modern plastic wing-nut equivalents) that screw everything together are decumbent to unscrewing themselves under vibration, and need more than robust lockwashers (which I have).  The gaskets between the bowl and the hat are non well-attached (not attached at all, actually) to either the bowl or the chapeau, so they keep flopping around and demand to exist secured with agglutinative. Pocket-size annoyances, but the mark of a tool either not-well-designed or that's been visited by the unit of measurement-cost-reducing suck-fairy.

That said, I like my new toy/indulgence.  I think that if I babe it with peachy care, I tin use information technology to hands clean big batches of hardware.  I will, of class, written report back as experiences accumulate.

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Source: https://permies.com/t/132286/ungarbage/Bulk-cleaning-rust-removal-bolts

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