my newbie lesson learned today

24 hours later, the AST34 with the hardernhell black coating heres where we're at:
using regular white vinegar, there appears to be little change in appearance of the black coating. Removing the metal and rubbing the coating it seems to be softening to the touch. Gummy maybe. Rubbing it firmly with a shop towel, you can remove some of the scale but no where near enough at this point. I'll try another 24 hours. It is interesting at the evaporating line (it is not completely immersed), there is clearly a much brighter line so there is hope.

In the mean time, I am trying Muriatic Acid (Hydrochloric acid)and will report on that later.

For soaking I have made a couple tubes from PVC. One is 1 1/2", the other is 2" diameter. The end caps for the pipe were glued into place for a water tight bottom. The top is a collar fitting that has a threaded opening, also glued into place. The threaded pipe plugs simply screw into place in the collars. Inside diamter is maintained. I had the PVC glue and 1 1/2" pipe. The 8' of 2" pipe and fittings came to less than $8. I might just make more of these things since they are so easy to make, are water tight and just cool to have.
 
stop talking about vinegar and chips. now i gotta go get salt/vinegar chips! look what you have done :D
 
What you are doing is called pickling. It works a lot better if you saturate the vinegar with salt! BTW pool Ph down (or is it up - the one that makes the pool more acid) supposedly works better, and is cheaper. You can use stronger acids
 
No luck with the vinegar after 36 hours. I'll add some salt and see what that does.

Also, the Muriatic acid (which is really Hydrogen Chloride 20% solution), did nothing after soaking for two hours. Not wanting to leave it overnight, I stopped it and will try again today for a longer period. It is interesting to note that when I splashed a few drops of this onto the concrete sidewalk it bubbled and fizzed with great enthusiasm and actually removed several thousandths of surface there. I can report with some authority that Hydrochloric acid will absolutely remove cement scale from any blade with ease.
 
I had declared the great vinegar experiment a failure and was cleaning up. The wife, who is not above watching my shenannigans, comes out and starts to rub the thouroughly pickled piece of steel with an SOS steel wool pad. The hardernhell black stuff washes off with just a little rubbing taking off most of the black leaving a clean, mottled light gray piece of steel. It appears the vinegar will work with just a little elbow grease. I had expected it to dissolve or flake off.
I also tried hydrochloric acid, a 20% and 28% strength. It bubbles, smokes and does in fact lighten the black hardernhell but does not remove it. I did *not* use an SOS pad on this as it is truely nasty stuff and I will not be playing with it anymore.
I now have more steel soaking in vinegar and will rub it down with an SOS pad to clean up.
So there you have it. Vinegar works, use steel wool or an SOS pad to clean up after soaking.
After all this, I will now order only precision ground stock and pay the extra.
 
Mike S -- do you have to draw back a forged bratwurst? Or maybe normalize it? ;)
 
hy guys,

The vinegar works great. I use it to remove al the scale from my forged blades. Before using the vinegar, i removed scale with scotchbrite and old worn out sanding belts. It gave the blades a 'semi rough' aspect with parts of the scale still attached, other parts of the blades mirror polished... With the vinegar, the overall result is a beautifull surface created by forging. A slight pass at the buffer and it's finished. Just great. I like it so much i'm becoming o so lazy: why bother cleaning and polishing blades? :) For pickling my blades, i just use a plain old plastic soda bottle.

tim
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top