by boroop Sat Mar 31, 2012 12:53 pm
Here's what I did with mine.
Get a large plastic container and add a tablespoon of Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda per gallon of water.
My concoction took about 50 gallons of water to fill my container.
Then you take a sacrificial piece of metal (finally a use for those old lawn mower blades!) and place it halfway into the mixture - mine is attached with rubberized clamps to keep them from sliding into the container. Next, attach the positive wire lead from a car battery charger to that piece of metal. And then hook up the negative lead to the seat frame (this can be completely submerged as it's just the negative lead
).
With all of this in place, set the battery charger to a 2 amp trickle charge and turn it on. I placed my charger on a power strip with it's own circuit breaker. That way if it did pop, it wouldn't take out my whole garage.
Switch it on... and let it cook.
This process will take a few days. After a couple days in the mixture you will start to see the rust magically bubbling off the frame and floating over to the sacrificial piece of metal. This process is called electrolysis and works remarkably well for the backyard mechanic.
My seats were about the same as yours when I started and each half of the seat took around five days to completely clear up. I removed the seats from the bath and used a leaf blower to dry them. Since my container was so small, I had to do the bottom seat portion first and then flip them and cook the backs.
There's no problem with leaving the parts in the mixture for longer than needed. You can't over cook them! Once the rust comes off, the process stops.
Once done, just dry them off, prime and paint. They'll look better than new.
When you're done, be sure to keep the lawn mower blades. You can use an angle grinder to grind off the rust and use them again for the next rust removal project.
