Metal stitching

watching this thread with great interest.

Mammoth, if you want to freight me the head with the hole in it, I'll fix it for you good and proper, with some of my magic Magna 770 rods, and it will probably take me no more than an hour.

Cheers - Ron.

Update on this one. I am following Onetrack's recommendtion and after using his favourite cleaner (citric acid, available from commercial cleaning suppliers) followed by phosrinse, will freight them over. Lock-n-stitch sent a quote for a kit using their smallest pins to do the whole job. Their screws are parallel, not tapered, and the thread form is such that it actuallty pulls the sides together rather than jamming and forcing the sides apart. The kit came out at $351 but then the freight added another $164. At those postage rates I imagine Deadly will be bringing back a lot of extra baggage for people.
I am still not comfortable using heat on veteran castings, especially after a recent experience on an aluminium crankcase - too much heat in one spot and BANG, a crack opens up. Their metallurgy is not what we are used to and much less forgiving.

Mammoth, I'm looking forward to receipt of, and then working some Magna weld magic, on your castings.
I'm sure the results will be highly satisfying to you, and you can rest assured I'll take extreme care with your rare items.

Cheers - Ron.

Ron,
can we get a blow by blow photo journal of your work. ive got some really old car and stationary engines that need a little bit of work. im really enjoying this thread.

wgipps - Yes, I'll take pics of the process to expand on the story. There's nothing like photos to take the place of a lot of words.

Now ontrack just remember what you told us all, make sure there is no way to identify were the pics were taken. .

Trevor

Slospeed - Not a problem. They will be pics with so much junk and scrap in the background, no-one will ever be able to ID where they were taken, or if there's anything of value in there.
I'll use my neighbours units as background, when I snap the pics, they have bigger junk collections than me!

Ron.

The cylinder blocks have been in a citric acid bath for about 5 days total. First try I just let them dry but the surface was a yukky glaze, and was rusting again. So in again for a day and pressure washed straight after lifting out of the tank (hard finding a sunny day roun here at the moment). Barely dry and then sprayed with Phos-rinse solution which leave a powdery grey protective surface.

Areas which were a little bit greasy were not touched so in another job of freeing up a Marles steering box I popped the steering column in, the idea being the rusty upper bearing and column will be cleaned but leaving the oily cam untouched.


This is what the bath looks like

The cylinder blocks will now be crated up and sent west for special treatment.

Mammoth, you're looking good with those castings. Yes, you have to pressure wash the items, as they come straight out of the citric acid bath.
In fact, sometimes I pull items out after a couple of days in the bath, pressure wash them, and then pop them back in again, to speed up the cleaning.

And yes, greasy areas are untouched by the citric acid. After the phosphoric acid rinse, you just wire brush the loose phosphate off, and you can either paint directly onto the phosphate-coated surface (with oil or water-based paint) .. or you can spray with WD-40 or with light oil, to give an oiled phosphate finish.

The oiled phosphate finish is compatible with engine oil lubricating systems, the phosphate in the oil is beneficial to the lubricating oil.