electrolysis test

[john moorhead]

Folks -

I have an old dovetail saw that belonged to my dad... very poor shape.... I am doing an electrolysis test on it to see if it'll remove the rust. I removed the handle and have had it going in the soda bath with about 1 amp at 10v for a couple of hours. I'll post more as progress is made.

The easy way to remember how to hook up the leads is the RED lead - is the RUSTY one... Put the sacrifical metal on that one.... The BLACK lead is what you want to have be "back in the black"....

More to come!

John Moorhead Lakeport, CA

[ATP]

If you add more soda you'll see more current and faster results.

[Silvan]

Hmmm... I can toss my cheat sheet now.

It will, of course, work fabulously unless you do something wrong setting it up.

[The Guy]

I just wimped out and used a sharpy marker to put a plus next to the anode terminal and a minus next to the the terminal for the cathode.

Side note: My Frankenstein bucket was not generating enough amperage to do a good job in a reasonable amount of time, so I tossed the PVC pipe used as a shield. After doing that, the amperage jumped right up to just over two amps. The next mod wil be to get some sheet steel to increase the surface area of the anode.

Tim

[Silvan]

It will really help. I didn't have sheet metal, so I made a sort of mesh thing out of some rusty rods. Surface area is your friend, and line of sight makes a big difference too.

Gots t' watch them sparks though. If you have a tricky anode and a tricky part, it's, well, tricky to keep them from getting too close to each other.

Sparks in a bucket of water that's generating hydrogen gas... Well, nothing happened, but it didn't look very safe. :)

[The Guy]

I was concerned about the potential for shorts. That is why I initially used a piece of PVC central vac pipe as a shield and drilled a bunch of holes and sawed some slots in it. This approach had two problems: First, the black steel pipe used as the anode did not have a whole lot of surface area to begin with and the shield really reduced what was "line of sight" considerably; and second, as the electrolysis worked, the "muck" generated by the process and degradation of the anode clogged a bunch of the holes. This further reduced the available surface area.

With the shield removed, the setup generates enough amperage to work on parts in a reasonable amount of time. To keep the parts being cleaned away from the anode, I lay a 1" X 1" piece of wood across the bucket and suspend the parts from the wood using plastic packing strapping held in place by plastic spring clips. This permits me to adjust the height of the parts to achieve maximum immersion with out having the negative leads in the solution. After all parts to be zapped are suspended in the solution, I then connect the power leads. So far, this has worked well to prevent shorts.

Tim