Removing Rust

I used to live in a dry climate. Having a home shop wasn't a big hassle. Things didn't rust. Then I moved to a wet climate and the fun began. Things rusted, so I oiled them. Then they rusted anyway. I asked around and found out in addition to the humidity (often 85%) there's also high salt content, so even normal protectants are less effective.

So far the best one I've encountered is Boeshield T9. No advertising, just a happy customer. I had a few cast iron tools that I moved when I came here, and sprayed them liberally before packing them up. Years later, some of them are still largely rust free, including a vintage machine tool I've been restoring over the years. Good stuff. But it's not a cure-all. It's a dry film lube, so it does tend to gum stuff up over time if you spray it on the ways or leadscrews. Great where it's great, not so great where it's not. Even with Boeshield I still fight rust.

A while back I saw a neat web site:

Electrolytic Rust Removal

Hey, a way to remove rust through electrolysis! Great! I even have the requisite battery charger and sheets of stainless lying around. But... It sounds like a hassle. And I can always use the old methods... For some reason I never got around to it, even after repeated rusting problems on my toolmaker's vise, a precision tool I rely on almost daily.

Recently another machinist I know was pawing through his toolbox and came up with a whole drawer full of rusted tools he knew he'd never use again. Knowing I do machining as a profession and as a hobby, he offered them to me. Interested? You bet! Most of them were high quality, almost all made by the L.S. Starrett Company. But he wasn't kidding: they were rusted, and until they were restored they weren't going to be of much use.

Cleaning a vise of rust using emery and elbow grease is one thing. Cleaning a whole set of dividers, not to mention squares, scales, and scads of other tools? You have to be kidding. So with desperation in mind I went back and started reading up on electrolytic rust removal.

It's pretty simple. Get a plastic bucket and dissolve a tablespoon of washing soda or baking soda in a gallon of water. Stick in an expendable steel anode and your part. Don't let them touch! Connect the positive (red) lead from a battery charger to the anode and the negative (black) lead to the part. Remember, don't let the part and the anode touch! Plug in the charger and watch the bubbles form.

In a couple of hours the rust has been dislodged from the surface. It won't fix pitting or damage to the underlying metal, but it'll take rust off without further damage. And it works! One by one I'm going through the tools and restoring them as best I can. And since every single one of them is an ideal candidate for Boeshield, you can guess what I'm doing to them once they're completely restored.

I've had offers of free tools over the years. Some have been worse than curses, some have been break-even in terms of the time I spent making them whole and hale again. By far this has to be the best of them all. I gained a number of high quality tools, and the elbow grease quotient has been almsot non-existent. You can't beat that.

-- Pencil

Firefly, Serenity, and the Mechanic

Completely by accident I wound up owning a copy of Serenity, a movie written and directed by Joss Whedon. (Hey, it was a two-for-one packaged with Chronicles of Riddick... was I going to say no?) Little did I know Joss Whedon had created a TV show called Firefly, and that the movie was the conclusion of its unfortunately short run of a single season. I won't go into any more of the history of Serenity, since that's already covered elsewhere on the Internet. Instead, here's my take on the movie:

I liked it!

I tend to be a little hard on SF movies, and have higher expectations than most Hollywood production crews are willing to come up with. I work in the science and technology field. When a writer can't get their basic science right, or picks a point of departure from established physics that's inappropriate or silly, it bugs me.

I was overjoyed to find this wasn't the case with Serenity. What's more, it was a SF movie in that the setting was futuristic, involved space travel, and had lots of action take place on board a space ship, but the movie was about the people, not the technology. Getting the characters right is equally important to getting the science right. All SF stories have points of departure from established science. That's par for the course. But people are people. Departing from that puts a screenwriter on dangerous ground indeed.

The characters in Serenity were wonderfully human. I've enjoyed Joss' writing in the past, and was an avid fan of Buffy and Angel when they were on the air. That same almost playful lightheartedness was apparent in the Serenity script, even during some of the darkest moments in the film. The very places where I'd tend to whistle in the dark where the times when the characters would come up with some almost poetic line to relieve their stress. It was great.

I won't make the blanket statement of "you must go see it!" since it depends on the viewer as much as how a novel is received depends on the reader. What's good for me may not be good for you. But if you like his other stuff, it's worth a look. I sure enjoyed myself.

In particular I really identified the character of Kaylee Frye, the mechanic. It's not often that these "below-deck" characters show up in SF stories. When they do I get my antenna up. A huge number of them wind up resembling Blish's character of Scotty (who by golly can change the laws of physics when necessary). It's refreshing to find one who doesn't speak with a thick brogue.

Kaylee is one such character. She's passionate about the machine, she takes things personally when it doesn't work or when someone makes snide comments about it, and she's uncommonly chipper and up-beat. She's also extremely human and earthy, and isn't cardboard by any means. In short she reminds me a lot of the people I work with. It's neat to see a mechanic portrayed this way. (I have to wonder what Joss Whedon did to come up with her character!)

I like it even more that her title is "mechanic" and not "engineer". Many of the engineers I've known have been good designers, even some of them good at fabrication. But only a handful could pick up a wrench and get down in the dirt. This is what a mechanic does by definition. A mechanic fixes the things that break, re-designs on the fly, often with whatever parts or tools are at hand, and by golly makes sure the thing works, no matter the odds. Kaylee is a mechanic.

One aspect I really enjoyed about Kaylee's character was that in addition to being a mechanic, she still got to be a girl. This is something few writers really pull off well, so it's nice to see. She would've been a flat character, otherwise. Thumbs up.

The only sad note to all this is that Firefly is still canceled, and the natural sequel to would be to continue the series. Ah well. You take what you can get. Thanks to everyone involved in Firefly and Serenity. What a fun ride.

-- Pencil