Manky Monkey Motors

OK. So i took the front mudguard of the VN at the weekend with a plan of sanding it down and repainting it.

Well, it is in a bit of a state. So i cleaned off all the paint and got down to bare metal. There is a fair bit of rust, when i removed that I had some holes!

So ive carefully peeled back the roll over on the lip and got out what rust i can from there, and given it a good wire brushing. Due to the costruction there will be rust between the bracket and the main metalwork i cant get at, and there is still some discolouration as well so I decided to try to get it really clean of rust by using a molasses soltion I read aboiut on the net.

Here is the mudguard before going in...

Got one of SWMBO's storage boxes from the loft and chucked her stuff out.

Then i filled that with water and molasses (10:1)

smelt lovely !!!

three days in, something is happening!

I will take it out on saturday and look :)

Chucked her stuff out?! Be careful she doesn't do the same mate.
What exactly is Molasses & where do you buy it?

Molasses is a black treacley substance made from sugar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses)

I bought a 5 gallon container full from a horse feed shop for £16!

I have read about the molasses treatment on the web and seen some youtube videos about it. It will be interesting to see the results.

Interesting!

Velly interesting.

Didn't someone here do a comparison of using molasses and using something else, a few years ago?

Ok, so I took it out this weekend. The rust is going, but its a slow process.

It had loosened a lot of the solid stuff between the inner bracket and the main mudguard. I managed to get a pointy rod between and rake it all out. the bridge between the two holes wasnt worth keeping so I cut it out. Now I can see the "hiddden" rust, so its gone back in for another week. hopefully this residual rust will disappear now.

I think I recall some sort of comparison test as well, something to do with vinegar?.
As for this test, Im wondering whether it will act like Kurust (supposedly neutalizing the rust) or it will remove it eventually.Great experiment Andy, but as the saying goes "aint no substitute for cubic inches",I suppose there "aint no sustitute for rust removal, other than cutting it all out."

So here are the final results after nearly three weeks soaking and frequent agitation (me or the part - you decide!) It clear to me most of the rust has gone away and left the steel clear. I think if i had enough time and patience the whole lot would have gone.

However, I wanted to get on with the job so removed the last bit with "Kurust Rust Remover Gel" - that finally got it shiny clean I think if I had waited ( or it had been warmenr- the molassses bath was outside) it would have come clean without this last step.

I like the molasses method best, did a lot of experimenting with this and other methods, i posted a little here and if you look on post 4 the links to the australian site were where i soursed the mix info i used and it worked great. here is the links off post 4.
http://www.mankymonkeymotors.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=11539.msg150764#msg150764
 
 Molasses is gentle and you can recover fragile stuff great. Along with boiling distilled water and cutric acid for aloy there is not much you cant clean up with just these two methods alone.