OutdoorKing Repair Forum Forums Restoring, Customising and Modifying Tech Talk Tricks of the Trade

Tricks & Tools for Cleaning, Preparing and Painting.

Hi All,

We have seen a number of great restorations on the forum lately, some complete and some underway! There has also been some interesting information put up in the photo gallery, and elsewhere, about some of the tools, and methods our members have come up with to help with restorations.

After some recent interest in getting this information together, we have decided to start a thread to allow members to share there experiences, ideas and knowledge on painting and preparation.

Please feel free to add anything you have come up with, that would benefit a member who is trying to re-paint there machine. I know some common questions that come up are things such as the removal of old paint, cleaning bases and engines to look new, painting barrels, primers to use, and what tool can be purchased or made to help complete the task.

This will be a sticky topic, so it will always remain near the top of this forum area, so if we could try to keep this one on-topic, that would be great!

Cheers Guys, Looking forward to seeing some of the great ideas you have!

Hi to All,
I think that this will turn out to be a most informative thread. The wealth of knowledge that we have on the forum will hopefully benefit all members undertaking a restoration for the first time; it will also assist the more experienced amongst us with some new ideas.
I encourage all members to share some of your trade 'secrets' to make this much visited topic.
Many thanks to Emmo1980, Mr Davis and Bruce.

I also have a home made flywheel puller of the same type, Joe Brown made it for me. they are awesome.

To remove the scum and garbage from alloy engine casings I strip them bare and soak them in paint thinner. THIS WILL DESTROY RUBBER SEALS. once soaked I scrub them with a wire brush, and from there polish them up with green scourers and leave to dry. To remove paint I use paint stripper as well..

hi gents,my starting point is to pressure clean all parts using degreaser,parts are washed in kero( i don't have a parts washer so and old 20 litre plastic drum works well),then sand blasted to give best finish possible for alloy.
on painted parts i paint strip as much as possible,sand where i can then sand blast any hard to get paint off.then prime and sand ,paint(when weather permits in Melbourne)
i have just purchased infra red heat lamps to get thing moving a bit quicker

when i stripped my base i hit it with a wire wheel on the angle grinder, then washed all the dust off and dried it with compressed air before priming and painting.

then i spilled fuel on it the day after [knocked the drum over] and it hadnt completley dried and stupid me tried to wipe it off with a rag, that was bye bye to some of the shiny new paint not to worry though, this is my everyday mower untill i fix the PRO460 i found the other day, then my old one will cop the immaculate rebuild and live on a strip of fake grass in the house well hopefully she will let me lol

Well, most of my "restorations" are more like updates or repairs so this comment is no good for genuine restoration work. However, I have found the best paint for the bases are the HAMMER FINISH paints. They can be bought in bulk or pressure pack. "White Knight-Rust Guard" from Bunnings is not bad. Sometimes I also give them a spay of top coat clear over the colour. On the other hand I have tried some of the water based glossy paints and do not recommend them. They're too soft and scratch easily. Lastly, spraying always gives a better finish than brush.

I use 'chemtech' 'shock treatment' degreaser. Buy a 20L container for about $60. Mix it 1:1 with water in a 2L spray bottle from bunnings and use that to wash mowers. Use care, its corrosive class 8, stings on sensative skin and eyes and stuff.
It does a good job, An old tooth brush for the stubborn stuff. Some mowers you have to wash more than once, wash it with the engine cover on, then engine cover off.
Will tarnish bare aluminium. Will also strip off some paints. Bad resprays with bad paints and i had one gold low arch thats paint didnt fair too well.
Gets grime off wheels and the like. Need to use the brush to help with grime around the lower edge of the frame and also the oily greasy thick stuff.
Ive only got hose pressure, if you had a pressure washer it would do an even better job.
Got a gravel front yard, i wouldnt go washing with the stuff on the lawn even though its biodegradeable according to the lable.

Also use the same stuff to wash out foam filters. A bit of hot water in a bucket a bit of degreaser and squish away. gets them clean, even the ones where the mower has been tipped upside down and the filter full of engine oil.
Also wash up plastic covers and air filter housings in the laundry trough with it.

I have mentioned elsewhere about electrolytic rust removal. Probably a few out there who don't know about it, so just in case, heres a brief run down of how I go about it.

I use a plastic tub of a size suitable for the part to be de-rusted, from big rubbish bins, to ice-cream containers. I mix a couple of handfuls of bicarb soda into the water in the tub and make sure it is disolved well. Then hook up the POSITIVE lead from my 4 amp battery charger to the business end of an old spade - any steel will do, some use stainless steel sheet - and put this in the solution. The NEGATIVE lead is clamped to the piece to be derusted, and the whole process starts.

After a few minutes you should see very fine bubbles starting to pop on the surface of the water, and may even see minute bubbles rising from the rusty piece. I leave the piece in the solution for some hours - sometimes a couple of days, until the rust has been removed.

Then, hose it down, wipe it dry, wire brush it if needed, and either paint it or spray with a light oil - WD40 - if it is not going to be painted - you need to either of these things to prevent rust reforming.

This method won't hurt metal, works only on steel/iron, removes rust including the rust under paint (and then the paint will flake off). The soltion can be reused until it is too disgusting - lots of rusty foam will form and there will be a sludge at the bottom of the container.

Just check to make sure you have good electrical connections - usually you will see fine sparks as you connect the lead. The other method to check good connections of the lead to each piece of metal is to very briefly short across the two pieces of metal with a wire - sparksa indicate that you have good connections.

This method is great for getting into hard to reach places, loosening frozen nuts and bolts, etc. Just needs a little patience. There is a lot of onfo on the net too.

Hope this helps somebody.
Jeff

Thanks Jeff. I'll just add one warning to what you have said. This process removes steel as well as rust, so don't set up a job, start the electrolysis, then go on vacation. The rust will come off before any substantial amount of steel does, so if you are paying attention, all should be well. When you run out of rust, stop the process.

With electolysis do not put stainless steel in there, it will turn the solution toxic, I cant remember what it makes but I am sure it was chromium something. Just a prewarning thats all, I am not a greenie by any measure but I dont want to see anyone getting in trouble.

Good thoughts there Joe, safety is paramount when working with chemicals and especially with electricity (at 4 amps)....

A product I use after cleaning, sanding and general surface preparation prior to painting is a product called "Prepsol", but can be bought as a generic name of "Wax and Grease Remover", from any automotive paint supplier.

It removes all traces of the grease from your fingerprints prior to the first coat, so don't handle the item with your bare hands after cleaning with this product.
It works a treat!!

Deejay, I think, and hope, the actual current drawn would be a lot less than 4 amps - that is just the rating of the battery charger (incidentally the better 4 amp battery chargers have a thermal overload that limits their sustained output to 2.5 amps so the transformer won't burn out).

Quite small currents can cause substantial erosion. I once destroyed the bore of a near-new rifle's barrel by running electrolysis at 0.1 amps for about 15 hours. (Before someone asks, it was leaded up by using ill-fitting cast bullets, and it was alleged that the lead could be removed electrolytically.)

Thanks for the heads-up there grumpy...not possessing a battery charger, I wasn't sure how they work internally.

The usual ones just consist of a mains lead, a step-down transformer, and a half-wave rectifier in series with the transformer secondary output leads, Deejay. One of the secondary output leads will have a red clamp on the end, and the other a black clamp. Pretty high tech, huh? (A slightly better one will use a bridge rectifier and maybe a thermal interrupter on the secondary side.)

There are much better ones that have a switching supply that is Pulse Width Modulated to produce a programmed output voltage. The program senses output current and voltage and applies three charging phases, commonly called Bulk or Current Limited, Absorption or Voltage Limited, and Trickle or Float. The Current Limited phase is based on the charger's maximum continuous output current rating, the Voltage Limited phase should be determined by the type of battery you are charging, and to a lesser extent so should the Float phase. The old lead-antimony open-cell batteries liked about 14.4 Volts for the Voltage Limited phase, but that would kill a gel cell or glass mat battery, and would overheat a lead-calcium battery (about 14.1 Volts suits those). The float voltage should be 13.0-13.1 Volts for a lead-antimony battery, and something fairly similar for the other types, though I think a lead-calcium type would like about 13.3 Volts even better.

The battery chargers you can buy range from a few bucks for a simple transformer type, up to the sky's the limit for a programmed type. Of course the manufacturer's blurb wants you to think most of them are the programmed type when they actually aren't. So, to some extent you get what you pay for. Of course you still have to use some sense: if you connect a big battery charger to a small battery, the charging rate will be excessive during the Constant Current phase, which will cause overheating and plate erosion. If you set the charger for normal or car battery mode and connect it to a gel cell, it will apply too high a voltage during the Constant Voltage phase, and much the same applies to an AGM (Absorbed into Glass Mat)battery. Above all, don't fast charge any battery unless it is an emergency. After a short time the cell electrolyte temperature will rise above the maximum allowed and the plates will be eroded.

So, you may have made the right decision by not having a battery charger at all.

Thanks Grumpy for that info, seems a bit like a minefield...I'm glad I don't own one now!!

A molases bath is also a good way to de rust parts.

Mix the molases 1:1 with water in a tub. Submerge rusty bit. Rust comes off, takes time. Get dog to lick part clean.


Nah, wash it with water. Dry and paint.
Seen pictures etc in a Hot rod magazine. Think i also read something on a how to website. Looks the goods, low tech, works and non toxic.

It is a traditional trick in the antique car restoring fraternity, Bob. Enthusiasts keep a 44 gallon drum of molasses and dump rusty parts in it for long periods (months if necessary).

Hi grumpy, that trick is an oldie...I haven't heard about molasses for years...

How does it do it, I imagine it is a chemical Reaction, But what does molasses contain that reacts that way with rust?

Well for my electrolysis I actually use a chemical called Sodium Carbonate.In a 50 litre bucket of water.I do use a stainless steel anode and a car battery charger.As per a manual I have to do this procedure.With this mix some items can be done in as short as an hour.For the badly rusted items yes it can take longer.In the manual I have it suggest that use use a Stainless Steel anode for better conduction.I certainly have had no problem with it,and I would recommend it to anybody who is thinking about it.Much easier especially for those hard to reach areas.Also save a lot of sanding.I hate sanding.