I just bought a old shotgun that was left out in a shop for many years. Is has rust throughout and some of the plastic pieces are broken or worn. It is a single shot break action 12 gauge. Not sure of the maker, but I am sure it is not a high quality piece. The plastic parts alone give that away. But it is different than some break actions I have seen. The lever for breaking the action is in front of the trigger, and is surrunded by a plastic piece. I don't know if it can be fixed, and I am not all that worked up if it can't. Just wanted to know if there are some easy ways to remove a large amount of rust. From a firearm. Would like to clean it up a bit and see if I could figure out what brand of gun and where it came from. LLB

OK, you want to derust this thing and inspect it.

Here is the best way IMHO, given a little time:

Get a plastic tub you can fit the gun in, it doesn't have to all fit in at one time so you could use something smaller and just do half the gun at a time.

You need-

baking soda
an old piece of stainless steel (I like to use old SS spoons or spatulas)
a 10 amp or so battery charger

Mix up a mixture of 1 tablespoon baking soda per gallon of water, put in your tub.

attach negative lead of the battery charger to your gun, positive lead to the spoon, drop spoon into the water and plug in the charger. Let simmer a couple hours, placing the spoon in different spots as it will have greatest effect on the area closest to the spoon.

for more detail do a websearch on "electrolytic derusting"

You will probably find some different recipes, the most notable being using washing soda (sodium carbonate) instead of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). Washing soda is found in the laundry section, arm & hammer makes it, but it can be very hard to find. I find baking soda works about the same.

How it works in brief is it will only remove rust, and leaves the parent iron alone. With time, the amount of removing it can do is pretty impressive, I have been able to clean up crescent wrenches that were rusted shut where nothing turns on them. You will have to move your positive electrode around though, however if you can get a strip of SS you can cover a greater area. It leaves a dark phosphate on the metal but not enough to resemble parkerizing at all!

Hope this helps.

Mark

Mark, thank you for that. I am saving that on my hard drive. Was thinking of having it tattoed on my arm but that is a bit drastic, but just a bit, lol. Nice bit of advice, gotta love this place.

Well if you change your mind and decide to, make sure you put it next to the tattoo of the naked chick with the big boobs.



Another thing you can do for spots is take your spoon and wrap a piece of cloth around it and dip it in the solution, then rub it over a localized spot. It works great for getting rust out of pits that way if you do not want to remove any extra metal, as in restorations. I haven't tried it on blued items, but I think they wouldn't be as blue as when they went in, as the blue is an oxide too.