Rust Removal of 50 years old Rust with Citric Acid🍋 

Schade, ich habe vor kurzem meine alte Gartenhütte entrümpelt und so Zeug zum Schrott gebracht

Plus, I assume they still work and that makes them infinitely better than the crap steel out there today.

Agreed

1 week later you will find water citric acid and iron in the water. For sure no tools🤣

The heater helps to speed up the process.

Indeed!

The caption says 48 hours @1:29

As hot as possible (ca. 40°C). It is a simple fish tank heater. And the fishes don't like it too hot.😉

could just use the sun come summer time.

It will react with pure iron also, yes. However, rust reacts much quicker than the bare iron, so the rust will disolve long before significant damage is done to the iron. It can and will affect the surface finish though. I would not acid submerge unless you plan to re-finish or paint in some way. The pitting you see here is from rust damage, not the acid. this is unavoidable. the best you can do to fix that is use a metal filler, sand, and paint if you want to restore a very old piece. You can look at electrolysis if you want a non-destructive rust removal method. Much more setup work, but arguably a better method for many applications. If you just have a little surface rust on a mostly ok item then maybe just use some steel or copper (softer) brushes on the area. A few drops of acid can help soften tough spots. acid immersion or electrolysis for minor localized rust is probably overkill because it can be cleaned manually fairly easily. You could also just use some commercial rust-convertor to convert surface rust to black magnetite that wont easily re-rust if your main goal is to stop rust from spreading.

@@TheStigma significant for YOU

@@meocats What is significant depends on how delicate the item is of course - and how bad the existing damage is. You haven't told me what you want to clean, so I can only generalize. In my experience, if there is enough deep rust that you want to use an acid bath then you usually won't care if you lose a few microns of the surface iron.

Dump it down the drain. It'll be gobbled up by soil bacteria. It's food.

It's natural and biodegradable.

The tartness in Lemons, Limes, the canned tomatos your mom made all contain citric acid. Citric acid has a working life span of about an hour, after that the acidic water does the rest.

As far as I can remember, I did add the citric acid by feeling. (So that it dissolved still completely in the water.)

Gold dosent rust so what’s the point?

@@cabinlolkj751 it was a joke !

Why you think its more or less?

You can use sodium carbonate to neutralize the acid and then WD40 to protect the metal.

Raw uncoated iron will immediately rust again. So unless it's painted, or at least oiled, that's going to happen.

Thats why he added the soda to neutralise the acid. Washing soda or garden lime will do.

Wenn ich mich nicht irre, dann ist minimal Phosphor in Cola. Ich habe das mal versucht und rostige Schrauben und auch einen verstopften Gasheizungs- Wärmetauscher eingeweicht - auch nach Tagen kein Erfolg

Not the stuff available here...far too dilute.

Last from the other end.