Thread: Electrolysis is it safe

Is cleaning rust off a blade with electrolysis safe for the blade. I have used it to remove rust from tools and a motor bike I am restoring, but wondered if anyone knows if it affects the molecular structure of a fine honed blade.

All you will do is remove surface particles that are oxides. The unrusted steel will have pits where the rust used to be.

Have dinked around with it using a cheap Batt charger,It works tho not a game changer IMO,as above, just removes rust.

There has been multiple threads of using it here in the workshop..

As far as I know / have seen no one continues using it, as mentioned already it doesn't really do much to improve the surface, in fact on a few of the tests it actually harmed the blades..

So far nothing has one upped good old fashioned "Work"

Try an advanced search you will find some long threads about it

Thanks for the reply, I tried searching before posting, but I think the particular shade of grey of my hair is preventing me figuring how to properly work this great site. I did realise it only removes the rust, but I thought I might be able to preserve some gold etching on a Boker Cutter blade

To preserve the gold the rust has to be thinner. They didn't use thick gold.

I tried it on a junk blade a few months back.
It removed the active red rust and some surface junk on the blade.
I left it a while longer and it got too hot and messed the temper of the blade up.
The good part was that it cleaned out manufacturing stamp better than I could have by hand in the same amount of time.
The bad part, besides the lost tempering, is that I could have hand sanded blade to remove the rust in less amount of time.

After the electrolysis, the blade was a dull grey, with black pitting on it.

I won't be using it on a razor again.