Thread: Electrolysis (sort of...)

As I mentioned over on the Molasses 101 ( http://straightrazorpalace.com/works...ses-101-a.html ) thread I recently had a couple of extremely rusted blades arrive and figured that I'd give electrolysis a shot. I opted for a highly professional setup involving a drawer from a plastic storage unit, an old brake disc welded to a hunk of cold rolled steel rod, an old ac adapter wired into the remains of some AV cable I have had lying around for ages, water, washing soda, and several espresso.



My two victim razors:



And the whole shebang:



When I plugged it in, something clearly started to happen



And before long the water was nicely cloudy so I was pretty sure that something was in fact going on in there.



The problem is that about 45mins-1 hour into the process the whole thing ground to a halt. I don't really have the electrical patience to chase down the cause although I suspect I might have blown the AC adapter, so this is going to be the end of my electrolysis experiment (hence the 'sort of' in the thread title).

Here are the blades after:



There was definitely an improvement in that there is less rust now than there was before, but I think it would have taken several more hours to finish the job.

So to sum up, it was kind of fun to play around with but the whole process was scuppered my my own electrical incompetence. And frankly, I prefer the manual approach to rust removal.