73 Honda CB750 Part 24 Cleaning & Polishing Aluminum

so what does Drano and corroded aluminum have in common you're about to find out welcome to hack a week [Music] [Music] yes that's right Drano otherwise known as sodium hydroxide it's a caustic agent and the way this stuff works is it goes into the drain and mixes with the water and it will actually eat away at any of the things that might be happening to be down in the p-trap but it won't hurt the pipes unless of course the pipes are aluminum that's why we're using it to clean up the aluminum what we're gonna do is mildly H the surface of this aluminum and clean it up a little bit before we polish it now it will probably turn it a little bit dark and that's due to the silicon and copper content that is in most cast aluminum alloys so if you're planning on anodizing your part don't do this because what you'll do is you'll have more of a copper and silicon content on the surface where all of the anodizing happens in your anodized ation won't work properly so this stuff's pretty nasty we're gonna wear gloves we're gonna wear safety glasses gonna take some precautions don't try this at home that said let's get started I've got three parts I want to get clean here today first one being the valve cover that's a little bit corroded you can see some of the corrosion and oxidation that's gone on here I don't think this has a clear coat on it I think it's just straight-up polished one time and it's been corroded this is the chain cover transmission cover also known as it's got some strange oxidation going on I could spend a lot of time and sand that out but I think I will be able to get a little bit ahead of the game by putting it into the sodium hydroxide solution you should have all of the grease and oil removed from the piece ahead of time the solution will take some of the oil and grease off but what will happen is it will focus on that and it won't get to the aluminum underneath and you'll kind of have some spotty areas this piece here goes on top of the valve cover it covers the chain it looks to me like this is painted so before we do anything with this I've got to strip this I've got some spray-on paint stripper so let's run outside and give this a coat and then we'll mix up our sodium side solution while this is doing its chemical thing chemistry okay got safety glasses on got the part here here's the stripper stuff gloves to protect my hands just put a little bit of this stuff on there and let it sit and it should just bubble the paint off and we'll rinse it away with water afterwards this stuff is made by clean strip in its aerosol as you saw does a pretty good job it's pretty quick you can see it's already starting to blister the paint up and it won't take very long before that paint is off from the aluminum and it's all nice and clean ready to clean up in the sodium hydroxide and then polish okay I've got a five gallon bucket here I'm gonna fill this up with water and then we're gonna add the sodium hydroxide crystals to this never ever the other way around also never ever to hot water it'll boil it'll splatter not pretty also not contained in anything the stuff makes a gas I'll explain a little more about that later let's fill this up I've got the water level in the bucket so that it comes to about the halfway point and on the valve cover that way when I flip it over it should cover both parts pretty equally but it won't edge one section more than the other you know what I mean okay now we're gonna take that out and we'll mix in some sodium hydroxide also known as Drano okay remember when I was talking about the off gassing that happens when you put this stuff in water straight up sodium hydroxide won't do that but Drano and other drain cleaners will there's a little bit of aluminum in there if you look into the hole here if I can get it just right you'll see some little sparkly bits see those in there those are actually aluminum shavings and when we put this with water that's going to create a gas the gas is there to help unclog the drain so this is going to cause a little bit of bubbling and if you were to put this in a sealed container would indeed explode don't ever do that okay so I'm gonna mix this stuff in with the water now this is a five gallon bucket I've got about three gallons of water in there I want to put about two tablespoons per gallon of water so 3 times 2 that's 6 tablespoons this little cup this is one of those little Solo cups it's 3 ounces I pre measured ahead of time right about to here a little bit below the top is the equivalent of four tablespoons so I'm gonna dump in about 4 tablespoons pour that in let it disperse around a little bit we'll stir this around in a minute now we're gonna add two more so that's gonna be about a half a cup now if it doesn't clean the park quick enough or well enough I can always add a little bit born I'm mixing up a pretty mild solution here with this amount we're gonna put the cap back on that and set it aside now we're gonna stir this around a little to mix up the solution still got the safety glasses on and I've got the gloves do not want to get this stuff on your skin if you do just rinse it off with water right away because it will irritate your skin it's caustic you can see on the surface there's some bubbles that have formed just kind of floating there so I've got this attached to some nylon string which I'm pretty sure isn't gonna be affected by the by the lye I don't think so so let's go ahead and lower this piece in there we're just gonna let it sit for a while let's take a look at our part that's stripping it's all bubbly and weird-looking okay we could probably rinse that off now and all the paint will be gone into the rinse cycle cool let's check back on our part here this has been in here about ten minutes it's cleaning up a little bit but it's not doing a lot I'm gonna go ahead and strengthen the mixture up just a little bit I'm gonna add about five more tablespoons here stir this in carefully being diplomat just flat always wearing the safety goggles and the gloves I'm gonna go ahead and put in the valve cover and the transmission cover final drive cover whatever and we'll let that sit for a while whoo bubbles see how the bubbles popping up that means that it's itching that aluminum in there it'll be careful not to drop my camera nor that's the end of hack a week so the other part here has a little bit of corrosion on the end I'm gonna go ahead and drop it in there why not can't hurt so you can get it in off to the side let that go for a while I just pulled this part out after about 20 minutes you can see how it's all dark except for a couple little places like right here along there there's another spot right there see how it still looks kind of silvery shiny probably because there's either a clear coat or paint on here so I noticed some of this on the valve cover also that's why it's not in there anymore it's over there off-camera with some pink stripper on it that's what I'm gonna do to this let it sit a little and see if that is paint that it will take off and then put them back in the bucket so the valve covers strip to one more time and I think there was a little clear coat on there I saw a little bit of some stuff come off so back into the bath with it we'll pull out the other part yeah it's nice and dark which means it's been aged pretty well I'm just gonna call it good enough on that one I don't really need to do it too much because it wasn't that bad so I'm gonna rinse this really well now with fresh water what I'm after here is to take off that dark layer just get it down to something aluminum and shiny but I can polish not too shabby its polishing up pretty decent actually doesn't look too bad at all that's just with the white polishing compound when I come back later with the red it'll get a little shinier than that I think I'll just do everything with the white polishing compound first and then follow up with the red later so coming along pretty good of course the valve cover is gonna take a lot longer than this but speaking of that let's go take a look at it and see what it looks like soaking in the soup okay let's see we got here I would say that that one is just about as done as it's gonna be so we'll go ahead and rinse that one off and the valve cover a couple weird spots here and there like right there I really think it's a clear coat or a paint that the stripper didn't take off so I think what I'll do is give this a rinse with some water hit some of these areas with some 800 grit sandpaper just to keep those scratches to a minimum just to get that stuff off there maybe even a scotch-brite pad and maybe let it just a little more and then we'll start polishing using a scotch brite pad on the valve cover here is to clean this stuff up and you know what I'm liking this a lot better than using the sandpaper follows the contours a lot better it gets off that black layer that's left over and it's also taking off any of that residual paint clear coat whatever it is that's on here so that's actually the thing to use scotch brite pad now bad that came out pretty good for the first stage now we get to tackle the valve cover not too bad it's pretty good a lot better than it was I'm not after perfect on this I'm just after nice and clean and a little bit shiny because let's face it unless I clear coat this stuff in about a year or two it's gonna go kind of dull anyway but at least this now is close to what the other polished parts were so now I'll go over all three of these parts one more time with the the red compound and that'll polish them up to a pretty high luster and and we're gonna be done that's it for the red stuff I've got some compounds stuck in between all the letters here so a detail all that out with the dremel tool I've got a little stainless steel wire brush on here let's see what that does to get the crud out yeah that works really well and it doesn't Mar the surface at all now we can get after the letters and a few of the other places I couldn't reach with a small polishing wheel with the dremel [Music] you know fine a little bit of cleaning by hand and we're good that is a valve cover ready to put back on the engine now that we're done what do we do with the leftover sodium hydroxide well we just pour it down the drain because it's drain cleaner if you've got a drain in the house that's running a little bit slow take advantage of this and pour it down there let it sit for a little while and give it a good rinse afterwards pour it down the toilet if you want to it's okay it's used all the time and it's just lie by the time it gets diluted in the sewer system or in your septic tank it'll be just fine so just dump it out down the drain don't dump it outside somewhere you know some animal might walk through it whatever it's kind of it's caustic if you get it on your fingers it feels kind of slippery which means it's taking the fats out of your your skin and just dump it down the drain so I just dumped all of what was left that in our bathroom sinks and in the bottom of the pail is all this black stuff what that is is those little bits of aluminum you saw at the beginning of the video they've all turned really black so I'll dump those out in the trash can and then I'll just rinse this out and this is my mop bucket so no worries there there's the parts on the engine looks pretty good I'm a little crowded here at the moment got this thing slammed up in here in front of all the other bikes but pretty soon we'll bolt this down put all the gaskets on everything and we're gonna get this engine into the frame on this baby right here so stay tuned for that that's it for this week thanks for watching thanks for all the donations and until next time [Music] yep that's right Drano today we're gonna mess around with some grammo but dream Oh

Channel: HackaweekTV

Views: 79,553

Rating: 4.9151945 out of 5

Keywords: electronics, diy, hardware hacking, hackaweek, motorcycles, circuit, automobile, mechanical, Honda CB750, aluminum, cleaning aluminum, polishing aluminum, sodium hydroxide, custom motorcycle, cafe racer, polishing, valve cover

Id: 7LM3PKY8Jvg

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2015