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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Working on planes

Been fussing over some hand planes in the garage. Okay, so what's new there?

Evapo-rust
Yep, that's right Evapo-rust
This stuff is cool. Dissolves/converts rust in a non-toxic and non-corrosive chemical reaction. It is rare to come in contact with a cleaning solvent that actually works yet is not something that you have to worry about getting on your skin. Here is an example...

before:


after:

About 5 minutes with a wire brush and the dark oxide comes right off leaving a surface about as good as new. Other than a little babysitting this process is a very minimal effort for the returns. Cost is about $20/gal and it is reusable.

Here is another example of what can be done.

before:


after:


There is some sort of an etching reaction as part of the process. Note the gray hue to the raw metal. This etch by itself will prevent rusting up to 2 weeks. Of course if you want shiny metal you do have to buff through it.

The No.6 pictured above was a fun project. I will most likely release it back into the wild though. I was looking for this size plane and picked up this rough one on ebay. Then out of the blue my dad shows up with another one. So here I am with 2 of the same plane except one does have some family relevance. I think I can flip this one now that it is restored for enough to cover the evapo-rust, stripper, and paint. Time is out the window though since I don't get payed to tool around in the garage.

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