Weaver's Delight Restoration - Pickled Nuts and Bolts

Last Saturday, I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon cleaning a large amount of bolts and nuts.  They had been soaking in vinegar for several days.  It was a perfect summer day, close to 80 degrees, with a light breeze, so I set myself up under one of our big maple trees.  To keep myself from getting bored, I listened to a free public domain book using my Audiobooks app on my phone.  I'm listening to The Golden Dream by Robert Michael Ballantyne.  It's about a couple people from England, that travel to California during the gold rush.

I really wanted to avoid my hands smelling like pickles, so I tried some samples of surgical gloves I had sitting around, and then put heavy rubber gloves over them.  It worked!  No vinegar smell at all.

These are cleaned parts in water.  I'm adding some baking soda to neutralize the vinegar before drying them in the oven.

The parts still had to be wire brushed, but it wasn't hard, just time consuming.  A whole lot of rust just comes off in the water, even without brushing.

My opinion about using vinegar, instead of just a wire brush or navel jelly is that I wouldn't bother unless the rust is particularly bad, or in my case, where I had a lot of very small parts.  Since I was painting the parts, I had to brush them again after drying because a light coating of rust formed while they were in the oven.  If they weren't going to be painted, it would have been simple just to wipe everything down with oil.  For some of the larger cast iron parts, especially those that get greased, I'm cleaning them with kerosene, as suggested in the WD manual, and just wire brushing them.  They will get primed and painted.  I'll be aiming to get the rest of the parts cleaned and painted tomorrow.  It's getting so much closer to being done.

All these parts have been painted, and I'm starting to reassemble the loom frame and the sectional beam.  I will have more about that tomorrow.