[TR] cleaning aluminum castings

Doug Hamilton douglasehamilton at shaw.ca
Thu Oct 13 10:43:44 MDT 2011


I bought a flat of 12 large boxes of baking soda at Costco and used it in my small bench top blast cabinet. This cost a lot less than a bag of blasting soda or any other blasting media. I have used this on my TR3's SU's, and my Fiat's weber the nice thing about soda blasting your carbs is you can clean every nook and cranny in the carb and not worry about the media getting stuck inside as it will dissolve with a quick bath in warm water when you are done. The finished product has about an 800 grit finish, as I look at the tower for my computer it's similar to the satin silver trim on the computer. When I'm done I like to spray aluminum and brass parts with "VHT Flame proof satin clear" it keeps the parts looking like new, but not over restored, and is very easy to keep clean.
Soda works great on stainless and chrome parts too as it cleans with out etching the harder surface.
My favorite use for it has been cleaning the electrical contacts in lamp housings before I use my Caswell brush plating kit to gold plate the electrical contacts pretty much eliminating future corrosion problems.
 
Doug Hamilton
1960 Triumph TR3A
1963 Fiat Cabriolet
 
Message: 9
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:47:26 +0000
From: "Fisher, Ed" <edwd at ti.com>
To: "triumphs at autox.team.net" <triumphs at autox.team.net>
Subject: [TR] cleaning aluminum castings
Message-ID: <67A276399E247245AC2050FC103C4E8A0420B9 at DLEE01.ent.ti.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Sandblasting with plastic media, if that doesn't work try walnut shells.  I
wouldn't go with anything more aggressive than that though...  Start out away
from the piece and work your way closer until you get the desired finish.

Ed
Dallas, Tx


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