Guest blog by Andrew Gain
One of my favourite pastimes on the weekend is classic-car restoration. But as any jalopy owner will tell you, the greatest challenge of any restoration project is… Rust!
Needless to say, when it comes to rust, shortcuts are the enemy. A shortcut today creates double the work tomorrow. So from that perspective, “de-rusting” automotive parts is a time consuming job that requires lots of elbow grease.
“A shortcut today creates double the work tomorrow”
What’s more, the process often involves many conflicting arguments such as, “Okay, that’s good enough, I’ve got all the rust”. Which is then met with a nagging sensation that says, “Stop being lazy, you know the rust will come back, so do the job right the first time!”
Well, that all changed when I stumbled upon two great products that should be in every garage man’s tool cabinet: EVAPO-RUST and Zinc-It!
I recently gave both products a try on a set of headlight mounting rings. The steel rings were pretty badly rusted and the retaining screws required several squirts of Q20 beforehand to loosen them up.
Once that was done, I dropped the rings into a bath of EVAPO-RUST for roughly 24-hours and waited for the results.
Much to my surprise, the rings needed no further scrubbing or brushing; I just rinsed them off with water, allowed them to dry, and then gave them a liberal coat of Zinc-It.
I followed the Zinc-It coat with a fresh coat of black spray paint, and mounted the rings to the new headlights. Viola, job done! No cursing, no elbow grease, and no back-and-forth arguments where laziness and guilt-trips battle it out.
I’m now excitedly looking for more rust covered components that I can restore.
