Topic: Rust Conversion

[F1Eng]

Interesting. I'll be sure to spray a resident spider web as well... Spider's gotta eat yknow? 

[Asstuna]

I really should have posted this here:

I had a rush of itshay to the brain and decided this morning that I wanted to have a crack at removing rust from the original suspension mounted on Pumpkin. Last year I put them to bed in the basement after layering them pretty heavily with Fluid Film. Obviously the rust hasn't progressed any further, but the strut housings look like itshay and I have loads of rust maintenance stuff in the garage taking up space and not paying for itself:
POR15 Cleaner/Degreaser
Rust-Mort
POR15 Semi-gloss Black
Carbide Embedded Nyalox Wheel (which was nowhere near as effective as the following)
Knotted Wire Cup Wheel
A blunt screwdriver, a pick, multiple wire brushes, face shield, gloves, safety glasses, breathing mask, etc

A bunch of rusty struts and tools:


A before photo:


Another before photo, showing a wonderfully layered flake not unlike a croissant:


After roughly five minutes of a rapid back and forth hand motion with a wire brush, an easy feat if you're as accomplished a masturbator as I am. Actually, it was pretty uckfaying tiring and the results were somewhat lacklustre :


Enter new scrubby things; a carbide embedded nylon wheel and a wire cup wheel for the angle grinder. The nylon thing was a dead uckfaying waste of time and was only barely useful getting into the more difficult to reach places. I ended up tossing the rechargeable drill and getting my heavy duty drill but the wheel was still ineffective. I replaced it with a smaller wire brush drip tip.


This thing was uckfaying awesome. I was a bit reckless at times and ended up snagging the cup on the job only to have it wrenched away. I had a good grip on it so never really scared myself, but someone like seatsafetyswitch is likely to lose his face.


Wear full protective gear, including a good dust mask/filter. I'm still digging black snot out of my nose even with a good mask. Long sleeve jacket FTW... at the tip of the screwdriver you can see a loose wire flung off the cup and embedded in the top of my workbench:


Results on a top hat:


Results on the strut housing:


This was after quite a bit of effort. At this stage I started calculating my hourly rate Vs. results and then headed off to the internet to see if I could run RCE Blacks on OEM struts - which happen to be seriously cheap on RockAuto.com and autopartsway.ca ... it turns out that my current combination of RCE Black on Koni inserts is the ducks nuts and I need to keep up the rust removal, conversion and painting and forget about buying my way out.

Next episodes: "How to lose an eye to Phosphoric Acid", and the old classic; "Painting, I'm uckfaying sick of painting"

One of these is bad for you... the others have caustic (sorry Tim, one of the Meguiar's Quick Detailers is no longer available):


Bath time:


Ready for rust converter... but first, drying time. I think I might have to break out the leaf blower (because winter):

[Asstuna]

Next episode, phosphoric acid and POR15 paint...

After several coats of Rust-Mort (75% phosphoric acid) the strut was left to dry for 24 hours (ish). They say to leave some visible rust for the conversion process to work properly... I may have been a little enthusiastic as the only two areas even slightly rusty were the bottom of the spring cup and the very bottom of the strut:






First coat of POR15 (turns out I have Gloss Black, and not Semi-gloss):

[Asstuna]

Oh, and ordinary paint thinner is uckfaying useless on POR15.

[Asstuna]

Final coat of paint is dry:

[seat safety switch]

Just wanted to bring this thread back from the dead.

Over the weekend, I used a $15 can of Zero Rust I had bought a few months ago on a set of wheels and I was confused because it sure sprayed just like ordinary Tremclad. It didn't convert rust, just like ordinary Tremclad.

Just to be sure, I got a $6 can of Tremclad off the shelf and hit another wheel with it. Pretty much identical globbiness, spray pattern, etc.

Go online and some guy is saying they're identical formulations of paint with a near-identical MSDS, then he gets into a fight with literally everyone on the forum including the forum owner so who knows.

http://autobodystore.com/forum/showthread.php?11872-Zero-Rust-is-nothing-more-than-a-Rustoleum-type-paint

I did however find out that Aluminum Tremclad contains flakes of aluminum, which explains why there are special handling instructions on the Aluminum colour that aren't present on other colours of Tremclad. It's the same price as black Tremclad but the aluminum flakes should help fight corrosion better than the regular enamel paint.

I dunno what a tie coat would look like if you wanted to paint on top of aluminum Tremclad, because the can doesn't explain it except to disclaim other Tremclad products from being sprayed over top. I doubt it will hold up over time without a top coat.

We'll have to see how the wheels hold up this winter, but this is my theory:

Tremclad is much easier to find than Zero-Rust, so I would prefer to use the aluminum Tremclad instead of ZR whenever possible.

Cheap paint to cover rust that may prevent further rust in the future: Aluminum Tremclad.

Cheap paint that covers rust: regular Tremclad.

Expensive paint that covers rust: Zero-Rust.

In all cases, you want to prep the surface extensively, probably with an actual rust converter or etch acid first.