THE PREMISE
Hardware can nickel-and-dime you when
you're trying to complete a project and
you've got nothing but rusty old junk coming
off your car, and missing a single bolt
can grind your progress to a halt. That
means frequent trips to the hardware store,
dealer, or restoration catalog to search for
the exact piece. We're not just talking about
the 100-point restoration guys either; we're
talking about guys like us who don't want
rusty bits and pieces ruining an otherwise
clean engine bay. What if you could reuse
most of the old hardware that's on your car
by cleaning it up and getting it back to looking
new?
The bowl holds up to 5 pounds, so we could
have tripled the amount of hardware and still
been within the limits of the machine.
THE STUFF
We picked up Eastwood's 5-pound-capacity
Vibratory Tumbler (PN 13539, $99.99 from
Eastwood.com) that includes two bowls and
tumbling media. It's small and is meant for
items shorter than 3 inches in length. We
also tried out the Speed Clean product (sold
with Speed Polish as PN 12578 for $24.99)
that promises to reduce cleaning time.
THE TEST
We used the included green glass pyramid
media and threw in a handful of bolts we
took from our '68 Ranchero project along
with a few Keystone Classic slotted washers.
For one batch we used Eastwood's Speed
Clean additive diluted with water to see if it
would cut down the rust-removal time compared
with the media alone. We checked in
on each batch after a few hours. For comparison's
sake, we also used our Snap-on
blasting cabinet filled with glass beads to
demonstrate an alternative method.
THE RESULTS
The hardware we thought we could reuse-
the small fan bolts- cleaned up in a couple
of hours with the Speed Clean and looked
great after five hours in the media. The
larger bolts were a lost cause to begin with,
but they began to show signs of life after five
hours. Our Keystone-slotted washers looked
great after five hours. The Speed Clean additive
seemed to help keep media cleaner and
did cut down rust-removal time, but the key
is not using too much. We initially added
too much water and Speed Clean, which
reduced the effectiveness of the media's
tumbling action. You only need enough to
wet the media and parts. Our bead-blasted
piece took only a few minutes, but we did
have to fish it out of the media when it fell
through the expanded metalwork area into
the hopper.
CONCLUSIONS
Vibratory tumblers require some time, but
they can restore hardware to like-new condition,
and you don't have to pay any attention
to them while they're working. The
Speed Clean cut our clean time by about a
third. Bead-blasting is faster, but cleaning
a handful of small pieces can be tedious.
A bead blaster also requires you to have a
pretty serious air compressor. The other
drawback to the vibratory polisher is that
it's small, but to clean just about anything
that will fit in a bowl, a vibratory polisher is
probably the right tool for the job. Also, the
vibratory deal can remove the anti-corrosion
plating from bolts, possibly causing them to
rust quickly. Cleaning of trim parts does not
present that problem.
