Restoring Cast Aluminum

hi the mud broker here I have finally gotten around making my video on restoring cast aluminum cookware Now cast aluminum is nothing new we'll get into that in just a little bit but before we get underway I'd like to thank my channel members SW wheatley27 Loretta Comer Billy Lee Lawton the needy Homesteader me and you Acres Rachel trembly Greg Boone Fred Rebels Mr Smith's kitchen Judy James Mike Newby Rich Miller Mogul smoke and our newest member Diana Harper in your honor I'm going to have a little glass of grog I greatly appreciate the support you've been giving me especially since I haven't really done a whole lot lately to make it worth your while hopefully that'll change one of the member one of the benefits of membership is the channel members will get to see this video a couple of days before everybody else does they also have a members only Facebook page where I sometimes do special giveaways things like that and uh if you feel so inclined feel free to join or just like And subscribe it won't cost you nothing to do that at any rate here's to you guys I greatly appreciate your support like I was saying cast iron cookware is nothing new it's been around since late 1800s and both Griswold and Wagner made cast aluminum cookware alongside their cast iron pretty much from the beginning of both companies what I have here is mostly Wagner so I'll kind of focus on that early on with Wagner they used the same patterns for their cast aluminum as they did their cast iron just an aluminum and an iron version of the same pot in this case it's a dutch oven sort of pot but it's kind of hard to see on this right now that has what's called a Arc straight logo on it that came out in about 1910 or so but also it's really hard to see has a four digit catalog number so that means this was made after about 1920 but they used an older style of logo and an older style pattern they made this particular style of Dutch oven from the early 1890s and this is one of the things we'll be cleaning up and trying to get restored a bit now later on they also made cast iron Skillets they made them from the about 1895 or so on they used to have a heat ring but in the 1920s like this one they started with the smooth bottom actually they use the smooth bottom that's my dog scratching himself against the door anyway they started using the smooth bottom Style on the aluminum pans before they did their cast iron ones and this one's from the 1920s nice little skillet in the 1930s Wagner came out with a line they called cook all with spelled with a k this is a hammered finished Dutch oven has a lid which needs a bit of work but they started with these in the 30s about the aluminum where that Wagner is most famous for is their Magna light they started these in the late 1930s early 1940s and Magna light is actually a brand name of the aluminum and magnesium alloy that they used for their cast aluminum of this type and they started to use different designs a lot more modern looking designs and some of them are really interesting designs this is as you can see a skillet with a lid it's a little bit different than their cast iron version and they start like I said they started getting some really interesting and really beautiful designs with their Magnalite wear they continue making that up into the 1970s now restoring cast iron is a bit or restoring cast aluminum rather I know I'm going to keep getting those confused is a bit different than restoring cast iron for example you cannot use lye or regular oven cleaner on cast aluminum aluminum reacts violently with lye so do not try and put these in a lye bath or spray them with the regular Yellow Cap heavy duty oven cleaner because bad things will happen and you don't want that to happen I've experimented with a few different products for trying to get heavy buildup off of cast aluminum and I found one that works really well and I'll show that to you in a bit most cast aluminum but not all was highly polished it would have a nice mirror finish a really bright polished finish now this other than getting the stuff off the bottom I don't think I'm going to do much if anything with the outside of it it has pretty much its original finish on it looks pretty good the inside needs a bit of scrubbing up I could probably get most of this off with just steel wool like an SOS pad this on the other hand it doesn't have a very highly polished finish but as you can see the lid is oxidized pretty badly it's got a dull ugly look to it other than that this is in really nice shape this doesn't need to have anything really done to it but I will be restoring this now when you have oxidation like this really the only way you can get it off aluminum is too wet sand it and re-polish it buff it up re-polish it and I'll show you how but uh where you normally almost never want to sand cast iron aluminum you can get away with it because it's really the only thing you can do to re-polish polished aluminum so what I'm going to do is get things set up I'm going to use this to show you how to strip nasty aluminum this is a wherever uh round griddle and as you can see it's got quite a bit of build up on there I'll show you how to get this off this won't need to be repolished because I'm pretty sure this never had a polished finish on it to begin with but I'll show you how to polish this up anyway let me get this moved over by my sink and we'll get started all right we're over here at my sank and it's time to start stripping this old griddle down now I tried a few different things to remove burnt on build up off of cast aluminum one of the things I tried was dip it coffee pot and food stain remover you used to be able to get it in grocery stores but I haven't seen it in stores for a few years but there's an industrial strength version called dip it XP that is available I have in the plastic bag to keep it from caking up on me and it works great up to a point it'll really remove greasy type of buildup and some of the really carbonized stuff but when you get down to the really hard carbonized kind of build up it doesn't work very well it won't get it entirely off what this stuff does work fantastic on is coffee pots things like that it'll take coffee stains off of stainless steel off of glass pots you'll take food stains off of pretty much everything but it won't quite take the build up off of cast aluminum you can get this on Amazon it's fairly expensive for a big box like this it's about 20 25 bucks I think but this will last a long time cleaning up coffee pots like I said you cannot use the yellow easy off oven cleaner on this because it contains lye but what does work and you can use on aluminum is the blue cap easy off oven cleaner it's the fume free as a blue cap a blue can it claims there's no gloves required but I'm going to wear gloves anyway because I have a bunch of cuts and scratches on my hands and I guarantee you this will sting like hell if you get men them but be very careful that you get the right kind get the easy off fume free comes in the blue can oven cleaner and I have tried this on some aluminum and it works really good and it works pretty much just like spraying Down cast iron with oven cleaner spray it on give it a good heavy coating foreign both sides good here [Music] foreign [Music] get the edge of it [Music] second while I grab a big plastic bag this is a garbage bag because that's a little too big to fit in just a grocery bag foreign a little bit more and slide this in the bag and let it set overnight there we go kind of twist that up and let her sit overnight and in the morning that should be good to go now when it comes time to scrub this off on cast iron I would usually use my stainless steel scouring pad but aluminum is a lot softer than cast iron and a scouring pad like that you can really scratch and gouge it I'm going to want to use a Scotch Brite pad because it's a lot less aggressive it'll work good and it won't gouge the cast aluminum anyway this has got to sit till morning so come morning I'll be back and we'll take the next step with it well here we are bright and early the next morning and we'll see how this did a bag open here actually I'll set this here and bring this back like I said you want to use something a bit less aggressive on aluminum like a scotch brake pad [Music] foreign get all of this off but it really did take a lot of this and uh let's spray this down let her soak again for the rest of the day till I get back to work get back from work rather but this is really coming off nice foreign big smear on my arm well like I said according to the can you don't need rubber gloves for this but but we made a little mix and scratches on my hands I don't feel like stinging and burning [Music] all right let's rinse this off foreign [Music] [Music] foreign as you can see that went a very long way to getting that clean I'll go ahead I'll dry this off spray it down put her back in the bag and let it sit for the rest of the day again which would be the same as leaving it set overnight but anyway let's get this cleaned up we're going to move on to the polishing part of our video on take my gloves off so I can touch my camera to turn it off and I'll see you guys later okay here I am back from work and we're gonna see if this came entirely clean should be pretty much at least at least good enough for now you get the idea of what's going on and how well this stuff will work so I'll put your little scrubbing here quick [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] all right it's not entirely clean but it's good enough for now good enough to show what's going on with this as you can see if you remember what it looked like when I started that really came clean I'm gonna have to do a little bit more spot cleaning on it get this out get this away from under this Rim a little bit on the top but you can see that stuff works pretty good you know a lot of times even with cast iron and regular uh oven cleaner it takes two or three applications this is no different but it's really common clean so you can tell what's going on like I said make sure that you use the blue fume free live free easy off oven cleaner not the yellow heavy duty which does contain lye very important because aluminum and light do not get along but anyway now we see what it takes to clean and strip the aluminum I'll just toss this in the other sink for the moment let this rinse down a little bit I'm going to show you how we can go about polishing it now like I said a lot of aluminum is highly polished to a mirror finish and this is another point where it kind of varies a bit from dealing with cast iron normally you would never cat sand cast iron once in a great while I have and uh I've done videos about that but it's rarely something necessary and it's never something you want to do as your first step in restoration before you know exactly what you have and exactly what's going on with it but since aluminum is polished to begin with the only way you can restore that polished shine is to re-polish it and on something like this which is pretty oxidized it's not rough it's not really pitted but it is oxidized so I'm going to have to use some wet sanding on it I'm going to start with a pretty fine stuff aluminum is soft you don't need a really aggressive coarse sandpaper to start off with you can probably start if it's really badly oxidized and pitted you may start off with something around 280 grit I'm going to start off with some 600 just to see I have 400 600 a thousand and 1500 Grit and with sanding the first pass you use with your courses paper we'll take off the oxidation the finer grits take off the scratches that the last sanding left until you eventually get to the point where you can use a Polish on it and we'll get to there but like I said I'm going to start off with a little bit of a 600 grit just to see what it does if it doesn't do a good job I can go down to 400. I'm going to wet sand this you'll want to do this someplace over a sink or outside you can use a bucket of water to dip your paper in a spray bottle works really nice with just water in it maybe a drop or two of soap and you just wet your item and you wet your sandpaper and you start sanding how long it'll take how often how long you got to do this it's hard to tell until they start but it can take a while yeah like I said you can use a whole bunch of different grits of paper along the way to get something accomplished but eventually you will get it down to the point where it's nice and shiny again I'm going to rinse this off just to see how we're doing yeah I think I'm going to go down to 400 Grit and uh work my way back up so but you can see it's already starting to shine it up some let me grab that 400 and we'll get you started and I'm not going to bore you to tears making your watch me sand this thing for I mean it's probably gonna take a couple hours worth of sanding on this at least if not more I'm just going to do the one side of it for now just for the sake of demonstration I'm not gonna have a sanding block but I'm not going to put it on there because I want to be able to follow the Contours of this a little better and uh a Sandy block will kind of only contacted in one spot foreign yeah it's a lot better anyway I'm gonna say I've done this for a while and I'll show you when I get to the final polishing step all right this didn't take me all that long you know I'm saying it might take a couple hours but this only took about a half an hour actually as you can see this is what we had to start off with this is what it looks like after going over it with 400 Grit this is 600 grit here and this corner is 1500. a good trick to know is when you change grits of sandpaper change the direction that you're working in because that way I don't know how well that's going to show up on camera because that way you'll be able to tell if you have all the scratches from the prior sanding off now like I said this is the 1500 grit down here and now I'm going to polish this the smoother you can get it before you polish it the brighter the Finish is going to be they make two thousand twenty four twenty five hundred grit there's finer sandpapers there's other ways of doing this too if you have a buffing wheel or something like that you can do your final polishing with a buffing wheel and uh but I decided to stick with things you can do by hand without any investment in equipment anyway I'm going to polish up this part where I did it with 1500 Grit and to do that let me check my camera angle here just to make sure you can see what's going on there we go I'm going to use this this is Mother's maggot aluminum polish you can get this at auto parts stores the auto department of most retailers and it's an aluminum polish now the instructions say you take a little bit of Polish and you dab it on with a microfiber or Real Fine cloth I'm going to turn this up here and you keep rubbing it until a black residue appears and if you have to add a little more polish once the black residue appears you work that in all directions and before it dries you buff it off with another nice clean dry microfiber towel and you'll probably see well once I get this cleaned off I'll show you let me give her just a touch more foreign side and we'll start buffing that off get that little bit there off switch some nice clean cloth I'm going to take this up here we're gonna get a better grip on it and give it a good buffing and rubbing and keep turning your cloth so it stays clean and there you go it's got a nice bright finish on it if I wanted to uh sand that a bit smoother it would have been a little bit shinier a little bit more of a mirror polish that looks really good up in there let me try something here put this couple of drops of water on it that didn't really help about the smoother you get it the more you buff it afterwards there bumped up to a nearly mirror finish now you see there's some fine pitting in there but it actually take quite a bit of metal off to get that out so I'm not really worried about them but there you have it a nicely polished nicely shined lid the more efforts you put into it the better results you're going to get I did this just as kind of a quick demonstration but that polish really shines it up nice the smoother you get it before you polish it the more mirror-like shine you're going to get so if you take this down to I used 1500 if I would have went to a 2500 grit and really smooth it up more and then polished it it would have been a little brighter mirror but I'm perfectly happy with that compared to what it was before so there's the video that's how you restore cast aluminum it's a little bit different than cast iron pretty similar though never use lye on aluminum I can't stress that enough and hopefully you enjoyed the video and I'll see you guys next time I'm back I had to add this little correction to the end of the video I got this Wagner pot all cleaned off and what I thought was a catalog number is actually says eight quarts so that means this was made before 1924 and before the uh stylized logo started so it was probably made in the 19 teens that's what I had to add so goodbye again

Channel: TheMudbrooker

Views: 30,871

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Id: WVTEler9hTg

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022