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Rust removal on porch railing; Needle scaler?

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Chukster

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Soooo, it's been decided that we need to do rust removal on a wrought iron porch railing, then paint it.

One of us (hint: SWMBO) thinks it'll be enough to grab a couple steel-bristle brushes & have at it for hours & hours, then paint. My prediction: Lots of effort, sweat, swearing, longer than expected, yadda yadda.

I've got two ideas:
1) Air compressor & needle scaler. Pros: Speed. Cons: Cost, either buy or rent, and noise. But that's what earmuffs are for.

2) Sandblasting: including draping canvas dropcloths on the bushes & on the house to keep from damaging them. Similar pros & cons, I expect.

Thoughts? Brands & models to recommend? (Yeah, HF, yeah, I'll drop by there at lunch tomorrow. Right)

Only other wrinkle is can I really justify buying, since I can't think of other projects to use a compressor for? And if I do buy, it's not gonna be the cheapest available. Life is too short to use crappy tools & bust your knuckles on them.

And location is Raleigh/Wake County, NC.
 
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B_Bimmer

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I think I would go with sandblasting for that but a picture would help. If it's at all detailed even a needle scale could be a LOT of work.
 
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goodysgotacuda

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x2, how bad is it? Some scotchbrite pads may be all you need and move on.

Needle scaler is slow and takes a ton of air.
 
OP
C

Chukster

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srmc john said:
How bad is the rust, could you use POR15?
Click to expand...

The rust varies; some places it's really attacked the base metal & flaked off a lot and bubbled up.

Glad to hear a scaler wouldn't be as fast as I thought.

Any thoughts if I could rent a sandblasting outfit for a weekend? And how much?

BTW, SWMBO is not tool-averse; she's a ChemEng. by training, & knows the value of good tools. I'm a very very lucky guy!
:beer:
 
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cgrutt

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grinder and cupped wire brush. Just removed years of old paint, rust and grime from a drill press and it worked great. I did use a needle scaler to get into the places the wheel couldn't reach. Note that needle scaler will do a good job of taking down old paint and rust chips but won't get all of the rust off.
 
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rsanter

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Needle scaller will only get the scale rust and not do much for the surface rust.
They are better at getting into corners and pockets than they are on open area

Sandblasted are great but they are slow and messy

Grinder with a wire brush is great and fast but cannot get into all areas

So...
Use the grinder with the wire brush and then hit the harder areas with the sandblaster

Bob
 
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bushmechanic

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If you pick up a cheap sand blaster, you're going to be fighting moisture here in NC. It'll turn into a water gun very quickly and clog up if you don't stick to good media designed specifically for the purpose.

It'll make a mess, as well. A big one.

Depending upon the length of the railing, I'd personally slap a flap wheel or similar on a corded drill and go to town on the thing. After that, hit it with some of that glorious purple rust eating naval jelly stuff from the auto store, follow up with a light brushing of the similarly packaged converter, Clean it with MAF spray, pre-paint, or electrical contact spray (all does the same thing) and then hit it with Primer and Rustoleum Professional satin black.

That's the exact paint nearly every ironworker without access to a powder facility uses.

The results will be solid, and you're only out a couple of wheels, wire brushes, and twenty bucks and ten minutes or so for the two treatments (not including the time it takes for them to work their magic); both of which work PRECISELY as described.

To hell with blasting and all that fancy ****. This procedure will clean that up very well, and leave you with a solid, very long lasting finish.
 
S

southalabama

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If you go needle scaler route the one from hf works well.

I'd prob go at it with combo of chemicals and wire wheel.
 
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bdelmar2

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Did a bunch of this a year or two ago.

Didn't have access to a sandblaster, but from the effort just to spray paint on it I would guess a blaster would be quite a pain.

We used one of those purple guns from hf. Had to spray it from two opposite directions on each side, 3 coats, then flip and do it again. Could lay out 4 sections at a time with the sawhorses/barrels we had available.

Good thing the other guy was left handed, I could make a run and then give him the gun and he could make a run from the opposite gun angle.

This was around pool, so we probably had more to do than you do - for which you should be thankful.

We tried a variety of methods and a straight wire wheel on a grinder worked the best.

The hf needle scaler did not work well at all. Didn't knock hardly anything off even brand new with new needles. Was loud as mentioned though. Tears up air fittings pretty quick also.

Problem with a Wire cup on an angle grinder is it likes to catch and fling away, violently. More than a little dangerous. This was with a couple different grinders, a 4 1/2 Milwaukee and an older larger metal bodied grinder.

The straight wire wheel worked better, could get everything with some effort, and as long as you hold on like you ment business it doesn't fling around. Heavier grinder worked better.

I seem to recall we did 12 pieces, 11 and a gate section, about 11' each or so. Took 2 of us 2 weeks of 8 hour days to do it.

However we did have to repair several sections - mostly the bottom c-channel piece as it held water and rusted. You can buy 20' lengths of it with the slots already cut. Plus we took it down and reinstalled it, was between square brick columns and each piece was a little different in length so they all had to go back where they came from and had to redrill and replace most of the attachment hardware.

I would say just the rust removal and painting itself took a good week of work (6 days).

Thank goodness it was just straight square pieces, the spiral stuff would have been worse.
 
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