Pickling will remove foreign matter from stainless steel surface but it won't make it look as you wish: shiny and brilliant. After pickling, the stainless steel surface will look gray and opaque.
There are pastes used by housewifes to clean their household metals: knives, trays, frames etc. They may help you.
Take care that there are two kinds of pastes: those used for yellow metals (bronze, brass) and those used for white metals like silver, among which we can include stainless steel.
Tell me how you did.
Giovanni S. Crisi
Sao Paulo - Brazil
By 3.1 Inspector
Date 08-20-2008 18:19
How about electro polishing?
I could of sworn that when you pickle stainless it gets rid of all the color or oxidation on the surface. I can't remember what it is but food processing places run some stuff through the inside of the pipes that makes all the color go away and it looks like a brand new pipe with a weld on the inside. I don't know anything about electro polishing. Does it cost a lot to have it done?
Electropolishing is the way to go, it actually removes the iron from the surface of the stainless steel. Electroplating shops or marine fabricators would be the people to send it out to.
If You were to do it in house You would need a large enough plastic acid resistant tank to imerse the part in, a power suply like used in electroplating and a quantity of the electrolite.
I think that electro polishing is the operation carried out on pieces that will be chrome or nickel plated, and it's done before the piece undergoes plating.
I've seen pieces just taken off the electro polishing bath and they look shiny. It should work also for stainless steel.
Giovanni S. Crisi
Kix, check out stainless shine, it's a product from Walter surface technologies. i did a canopy quite a while back that started getting light surface rust, i used this and it disappeared and gave it a respectable clean shine.
JJ
Hello Ray, I'm a little late on this, but DeRustit makes some chemical washes for stainless steel that will take off the heat marks and if I recall correctly they aren't work intensive. As I recall you spray it on, let it set, and then rinse it off with water. Seems to me they also had a program where they would provide you with a sample to try it before you buy it. Otherwise, I also did a short stint for a food equipment manufacturer that used an electro/chemical process where they had a wand with a sponge on it that was attached to some form of electrical power source, you would dip the wand in a chemical, the power source had a ground clip that was attached to the part and as you rubbed the sponge on the part it would remove heat lines and other surface colorings. I can't remember the name of the product or the manufacturer though. I do believe I have read other posts on the forum where others have described this process as well. Good luck and regards, Allan
Sid, thanks for the link! That has just about everything a guy would want to know about pickling and cleaning stainless. Al, I heard about that gel or paste stuff from my supplier and more info on that is in route. I like the sound of the electropolishing with the spunge trick. I wish I could have it demoed to see how good it works. I'm also going to look into that Derustit stuff because "not work intensive" sounds like the noise you hear when the slot machine starts kickin out money.;-)
