Tool rehab

Well, tonight is my last day before returning to work.  I had a good -- and productive -- week off:  I spent it doing things from my "To Do" list -- my fun "To Do" list, not the "Ought To/Responsibility" list.  Well, except for doing laundry, doing some dishes, and feeding the kids.

I had a bunch of rusty tools that I'd picked up at an estate sale maybe a year ago.  I started cleaning them up on Weds, 9/21.  Tonight is Sunday, 9/25, and I've completed the process.

Usually I'll soak rusty metal in white vinegar for a few days, then use a wire bush (a "hand" brush, not a wire wheel) to remove the loosened rust and crud.  But this time most of the items were attached to wooden handles -- so I thought I'd try a different approach.

Most of the time for this project was taken by using the wire wheel on my bench grinder to remove all the rust.  Once I'd done that, the faster component was wiping the wooden handles with my 50-50 mix of boiled linseed oil and methyl alcohol (as a thinner).

Here's my setup, under the carport.  The wooden table thing is something I built a few years ago:  it's kind of a portable, mini-workbench, that I use a lot.

I don't set up the grinder in my workshop, because (a) I don't have the room (it's small, and currently crowded and messy), and (b) I don't want to spray rust and crud all over.

After a fair number of (meditative) hours spent grinding rust and crud off, over the course of a few days -- interspersed with other projects -- here are the results:  I tried to arrange them in the same order as on the plank in the earlier photo.  (The pruning shears, at the bottom of the photo, was a late addition.)

After grinding off the rust from each item with the wire brush, I sprayed the metal section with WD-40 before it had a chance to re-rust.

I could've sanded back the wooden handles, prior to oiling them -- but I wanted to retain their well-used, "found in an old barn" look.

The top three items are lathe tools for woodworking -- clearly "user-made".  One of these days I'll actually purchase a lathe...

The thing that's just above the handplane blade is a narrow trowel:  bad angle; it doesn't show up very well in this photo.


Note that the hammer to the right now has its handle:  in the original photo it did not.  The re-handling is the subject of another blog entry.


--GG