Removing Rust In a Fuel Tank With Electrolysis - How To

all right everyone in this video we're talking about electrolysis to remove rust from this fuel tank here so i'm going to take you through step by step exactly what i do in this process so stick around [Music] now the idea with electrolysis is that we're going to use electricity pass through an electrolyte to actually remove the rust from the inside of the tank now the way this works is we have a battery we're going to hook up the negative side to a metal source on the tank and then we're going to hook up the positive side to a sacrificial anode that we're going to insert within the tank and then the electrical current is going to pass through a water and sodium carbonate solution called uh called an electrolyte and that is going to remove the rust from the tank and it's going to turn into basically like a goo that's going to come out of the top here it's really easy it's it's actually very cost effective and it works really well this is kind of my go-to thing for fuel tanks that don't have like let's say a lot of like scaling or anything like that you know pretty light rust this this works fantastic so let's get into it all right now let me see if i can show you guys the condition of the tank that we're working with here so within it's uh you can see there is bare metal and there's nothing really flaky or scaly on the tank the metal itself is really not that bad but it's still something we need to clean up there we go so the electrolysis is going to be perfect for this now to get started we need to set up our anode and this is the sacrificial piece of metal what i like to use is just a you know piece of round bar i usually put a bend on it because you want as much extending into the tank as possible within reason and then here you can see i use a paint cap it's kind of my hack that i do it with and this sits down in the tank you do not want the metal to contact the tank at any point so what i need to do is uh modify the cap a little bit we'll do a little cut right here that will allow it to fit down over this section and fit a lot more uh fit with a lot more stability in the tank and voila you see a little cut there so it fits in fits around there nicely i do end up taping this to the tank but wiggle the metal around there's no contact we'll align that how we need going forward but that section is done one thing of note obviously you guys will have to plug up the bottom of the tank so i just made a cap there from an old petcock that i had and it is sealed so now we can fill this thing with a liquid and begin the process now with doing this process one thing one key component to this is time so wherever you have the tank you need to make sure it's in a good spot that it doesn't need to be messed with for at least 24 hours that's kind of my go-to usually i do this over the course of two nights but i'm going to go ahead and clear a spot over here that we can leave the tank overnight all right i'm here at the sink and for this uh maybe somebody could correct me but i feel hot water works better for this instead of just cold water um it may be something i've read somewhere but with my experience i've done this a ton of times i feel hot water is best to start with so what i'm using here is of course clorox pool ph up this is sodium carbonate i get this at lowe's it's probably i don't know eight bucks for this pack and this will last you a long long time now with this more is not more better so what i do use about a cup for an entire five gallon bucket it doesn't really increase the strength of it basically that is determined by the the battery power not good there hot water going now while this is filling one of the things that i really like about this process is that it's safe this is really safe stuff it's not like carrying around the acid it's also really inexpensive basically you're out the cost of the water and then the sodium carbonate and then your time so this is another reason i really like this process once this is full we're gonna run up and try to get it in tank as fast as possible all right time to pour this in you're gonna spill a bunch so set up a funnel do the best you can thirsty all right now i have this filled up all the way to the brim and some is gonna spill over now this is not necessarily like really hard on the paint but if you want to put like a layer of like carnauba wax all over the tank um that's something i've done in the past with bikes with decent paint jobs just for added protection but now it's time to kind of set up our cathode and anode and we're going to get started on this so what i have is just a battery charger this one's 2 amp that's kind of the most powerful one i have but if you have like a car battery and something maybe a little bit more powerful that's fine too that should actually get the job done faster but for me that's what i got so here's our anode i'm going to go ahead and get this inserted we've already mocked it up so we know where it's going to fit and then what i do is i take some tape and i get this thing held in place not only with the cap placement but also the anode itself so one thing i do because you're going to have tension from your battery cable kind of give it a little pull that way we'll pull that way i just get it under tension that way it can't move as easily now what we do is the important part your negative cable goes to a clean piece of metal on the back of the tank the positive goes to the anode you want to make sure that when you put this on here it doesn't move around a lot and contact anything in the tank so as of now this is actually working but we obviously need to replenish the battery as we're going so that's where the battery charger comes into play so we're just going to hook this up and this thing is working so here's the setup review we have a piece of bare metal on the actual fuel tank the negative side goes to this the positive side goes to the sacrificial anode this is not touching any metal okay and the electrolyte within this with the sodium carbonate that is what's passing electricity through it so basically we're eliminating we're taking the rust that's off of the surface and we're turn we're actually filtering it and we're drawing it through to the anode so whenever we take this out in a little bit you will actually see there is a lot growing on it all right so i'm going for about six hours here let's check our progress of course i got to kind of redo all the tape and stuff but that's no big deal you still you can feel there's like a slight bit of temperature in the actual tank so let's kind of see if it's still potent right now there is a reaction working kind of slow you can see the bubbles there now as of now it is still working so i went ahead and just cleaned off the uh the anode there it is reinserted re-taped and then we're just going to let this run until uh until tonight it's about 7 p.m now so i'll come back in at you know nine o'clock refill this thing and let it run overnight and then should be good to go all right so it's been about 24 hours i actually did not change out the liquid in here like i said i just ended up kind of going inside letting this do its thing so let's see where we're at pretty disgusting [Applause] so fresh solution with a clean anode see how quickly it starts working all right you can see i've got this thing hooked back up i went ahead and did a uh a fresh run of new solution it's bubbling and fizzing as you saw definitely it's a an easy process to do and i'm gonna let it run the course of the day i'll probably drain it out tonight and we should be good to go all right well we have let this thing run all day and i am feeling confident in it being good enough so let's kind of take a peek at what we got yeah see not quite as much which is what we expected but i'm going to drain this thing out and then go ahead and start flushing it out and we will put some uh probably some fogging oil in it just to keep it from flash rusting even though it's not typically as noticeable of a flash rust in these versus like let's say using acid or something like that [Music] so what i'm doing here is just got a little towel actually on a pinch of grabby and you can actually wipe off quite a bit of the crud that's still kind of hanging on there [Applause] you could go a step further and like put a chain in here and just kind of move it around knock all the stuff loose but it's looking really good so you can see the areas where i've like kind of wiped it off there otherwise though this thing's looking really good [Music] [Applause] we just repeat that until it runs clean so i'm going to go ahead and pull the drain off the bottom as well and we'll just circulate water through the tank until it's clean then we will put some fogging oil in and keep them from rusting so i'm using a heat gun to dry this thing out because if you use compressed air you can put a lot of moisture into the tank and it'll just never be dry but get some hot air in here let it dry out nice and then we're gonna go for the fogging oil i think i found this at like napa or something like that [Applause] all right so i've run a lot of heat through this thing you see it's starting to flash rust just a hair nothing as bad as what it was overall the tank is in much better condition so i'm gonna go ahead get the fogging oil in it asap oh no now if you're going to go ahead and put gas in this thing this step is probably not necessary but being that i still have some work to do to the bike it will be sitting idle for a little bit so to eliminate any potential surface rust issues we're going fogging oil all right all right and we are done with the tank this thing is ready to go whenever we need it and hopefully this video was informative i wanted to show you guys the process of electrolysis because it really is a cost-effective safe and easy way of removing rust from anything that you need to remove rust from so anyway check out the website check out some of the videos on the channel if you could and subscribe if you haven't already i'd really appreciate it but i hope you guys like this video and hope to see you in the next one thanks for watching you

Channel: Brick House Builds

Views: 450,502

Keywords: removing rust with electrolysis, how to remove rust in fuel tank, motorcycle gas tank, motorcycle gas tank rust removal, electrolysis how to, electrolysis, electrolysis rust removal, how to do electrolysis rust removal, motorcycle fuel tank restoration, safe rust removal, honda cb750, cb750 restoration, motorcycle restoration, how does electrolysis remove rust, how does electrolysis work, how to remove rust, brick house builds, brick house builds cb750, cb750 carb rebuild, cb750

Id: ICW01HFbaxc

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022