Rust never sleeps: Save your stuff by understanding the thing most likely to kill it (pt. 2)

Mr. Product
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Click here for part 1.

Rust is like a gambling problem. It’s a lot easier to stop it before it starts than dig yourself out once you’re in a hole. Unfortunately, rust can never be reversed. We can’t turn oxidized iron back into non-oxidized iron. Just like you can’t turn a charred piece of wood back to what it was like before the fire. Our only hope it to stop it from spreading. Therefore the best work we can do is prevent it from starting in the first place.

How to keep it away

The easiest strategy for keeping rust at bay is four parts:

  1. Dry things off. If you can keep a piece dry from water entirely, that’s great. But not likely. You need to drive your car in the rain. You need to wash your knives. The key is wiping water off when you’re able and not letting things sit in water (or vice versa).
  2. Keep salt away. Or at least clean it off. Salt accelerates the rusting process in a nasty way. In snowy winters, crews spread salt on the roads to improve traction and melt ice for drivers. This saves lives, but kills cars. Worse still is the way snow clumps harden and stick up inside your wheel wells. This is why you first notice rusting along the tires of a vehicle and along the bottoms of doors and fenders. If you live somewhere like this, please visit the car wash regularly in the winter where they can clean out the underbody. If you can see visible rusting from the outside of a vehicle, you’ve got a lot more underneath.
  3. Preserve what’s already protecting it. A lot of metals, including cars, have a layer of protective coating between the metal and the elements. Even if it’s nothing more than a coat of paint, this can keep water from seeping into the microscopic cracks in the iron and starting the oxidization process. One small chip or scratch in a product’s surface should be cheap and easy to fix.
  4. Add a protective coat. A lot of metal products don’t come with a protective coat, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add one. Specialty clear coats and rust preventers are available. Boiled linseed oil is also an easy way to add a thin invisible layer of protection to any metal tools or other products. This method tends to make moving parts sticky so try to not use on moving parts. Otherwise wipe on a thin coat and let it dry for 24–48 hours. *Note: Boiled linseed oil is really, really flammable and you should read the instructions carefully about use and storage. Here’s a great piece with more info on using boiled linseed oil.

How to get rid of it

I mentioned earlier that rust is like a fire. Technically the best way to stop a fire,is to choke off the oxygen. But that’s usually not practical or even possible. If your house catches fire, you can’t suddenly wrap it in an airtight bubble. We could stop rust the same way. But again, pretty impractical.

Instead what we do is stop the carnage from spreading by eliminating all traces of the fire. Or in this case, the rust.

First, know if you’ve got something worth saving. Like I mentioned in part 1 of this piece, rust isn’t like a growth you can just peel off and find your original metal underneath. Rust is your original metal transforming in a permanent way. That means any attempt to remove rust is based on the hope that there’s enough non-rusted metal underneath to make the product worth saving.

Thankfully this is often the case. A lot of alloys rust slowly, and all you need to do is scrape off a thin surface layer. Your product will become some microscopic amount thinner, but you won’t notice. Where things get tricky is when a piece is totally rusted through. Fortunately, this can take years, thousands of years in some cases. Centuries-old metal shipwrecks are still a long way away from total disintegration.

So if you’ve deemed your rusted product is worth saving, there are a few ways to approach removing rust.

  1. Vinegar. The easiest and cheapest approach. Drop your item into some white vinegar for a several hours up to a few days. A lot of the rust will rinse right off.
  2. Liquid rust removers. A more expensive but possibly quicker solution is a specialty liquid rust remover. Here’s a good analysis of some of the popular options on the market.
  3. Steel wool. In a lot of cases few seconds with a steel wool scrubber is all it takes to scrape off a thin spot of rust. Steel wool is just a bundle of really fine steel filaments. But their tiny, flexible sharp edges work as a really excellent abrasive surface for scraping off rust and other gunk. Like sandpaper, you can get it in different grades, from super fine to extra course.
  4. Electrolytic rust removal. This is the most complicated and science fair-ish solution on this list. But it also could include the least amount of elbow grease. Electrolytic rust removal is a process of creating a chemical change in the oxidized iron by passing an electrical charge through a liquid solution. The chemical change separates metallic materials (your stuff) from non-metallic materials (the rust). *Note: Unfortunately we can’t do anything stainless steel in this process. Electrolysis breaks down stainless steel into some pretty nasty stuff.

Life’s better with the right products. Mr. Product articles go out every Thursday morning. Send a note and I’ll email you when I publish new pieces.

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