look at these rusted ass bolts here we're gonna clean these
babies up with some white vinegar get them back to brand new again
hey guys welcome back to the channel so today i'm gonna go over a little quick tech tip
while working in the garage so recently i was working on my is300 and this car spent like
half its life in virginia where it was exposed to salted roads so some of the exhaust bolts
and the underside suspension bolts were kind of rusted and corroded when i was working on
them so i'll show you today how to turn a rusted bolt into something like this that's
stripped clean of all the rust and corrosion and it's back to its bare metal using just some white
vinegar some baking soda and then some tumbler media that i have you could restore your bolts
back to their original metal and get rid of most of the corrosion so anyway stay tuned
so all these bolts that are all rusted and corroded right here and then these ones are
just kind of dirty and a little bit rusty so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use some white
vinegar this stuff dissolves all the rust off of here attacks all the rust and it leaves the metal
alone so i'll leave it soaking for a day or two and then clean it off with some baking soda
and see how it looks after that the acid and how the the vinegar breaks away at the rust
in here i'll get a cover for these babies and then we'll check back in a couple days
so after an overnight soak this is what it looks like so these things yeah you can see all the
corrosion and stuff that's not supposed to be stuck to the steel kind of just separated like all
these little bits i'm gonna let it sit for another day or so and then we'll clean all this stuff up
so we let this stuff basically sit for a couple days now look how nasty this got right here look
at all that rust and everything that bubbled to the top when i took the lid i left it sitting
without the lid on the other day i had the lid on right there and yeah that stuff looks freaking
nasty as hell so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to take out the pieces i'm going to dip in
this bath of baking soda so baking soda is basic and vinegar is acidic so that's what's going to
cancel each other out if you guys remember from chemistry class this other bucket i put rusted
bolts in wasn't as bad as this one this one had the most corrosion i guess and it got yeah it
did a number on all that but that's all iron oxide right there start getting this stuff out
actually this one wasn't as this one was the least corroded one
i wonder what the hell all this crap is
pretty much got everything cleaned up it's just dirt and
stuff now that i just gotta scrape off with a brush all the rust and corrosion is gone
so i was able to clean most of this stuff up so you'll notice most of these bolts are nice
and clean now i don't know if the bolts like the bell housing bolts were galvanized before i don't
think they were they weren't really corroded they were more dirty than anything so i didn't really
think i stripped anything the one thing i did strip though is the galvanized coating that's on
these brackets and then also the cross member bolt these bolts that bolt to the aluminum cross member
bracket for the transmission they were actually a gal that had a galvanized coating on them
and i actually stripped it all i didn't know that vinegar strips galvanized coating so i'm going to
run these through the tumbler to get them all cleaned up and i'll probably just hit them with
a like a clear coat or some kind of satin coat to protect them the rest of this stuff these exhaust
bolts got pretty much cleaned up you can see there i'm gonna put them through the tumbler those are
the caliper bolts that i was working with and some of these were the just break parts that i had for
my other project that's going on right now so i've got my tumbler media out with my vibrating tumbler
here so this is that blue media that you can buy at harbor freighter on amazon i'm gonna throw all
my bolts and everything in here i'm gonna let this run overnight to kind of get everything
cleaned up get all the grease and any leftover rust and corrosion all polished up on these bolts
here's what that blue or green media looks like when it's new
and the gray stuff has been used once or twice so it absorbs a lot of the
black and crap that comes off of it so i'm gonna go ahead and start this baby
so i let this thing tumble overnight for about 12 or 13 hours and everything came out nice and
shiny look at this bracket it was pretty corroded and rusted before now it's a nice shiny polished
silver a lot of my bolts the ones that i stripped all the zinc off of they're all nice and polished
now so most of these i'm gonna just clean them up now get all this dust and everything from the
tumbler media out i'll show you guys after i clean it all up how shiny everything is
look how shiny these babies are so what i'm gonna do now i'm gonna put them into my ultrasonic uh
cleaner with some degreaser let it run for like five or ten minutes
uh a couple cycles on that ultrasonic cleaner and then see how clean these
things actually come out after i clean off all the dust and everything on them
so even though this ultrasonic cleaner warms water by itself i'm just adding warm water
to it to speed up the process
just add a little bit of degreaser in here
let that mix in i might add a little bit of cold water just to bring the levels up start
the ultrasonic cleaning turn it on sorry warm so we're gonna go with timer turn the timer to the
maximum which is i think 480 go ultrasonic clean and just let it clean 480 seconds
so i've let this baby run an ultrasonic cycle a d gas cycle and this is a second ultrasonic cycle so
it's about to come to an end now this should clean it up pretty well so out and kind of rub them down
yeah this baby is sparkling now this thing was completely black this is the one the brake
calipers for my brake project the one thing with these is the threads are still full of
all the dust but uh that's no big deal once you start screwing them in though they'll clean those
things right out by themselves like this guy is the rear brake pad bracket that was on my other
brake pad project and yeah this thing is brand spanking new yeah there's one of the bell housing
bolts that was really dirty full of grease inside the nut one of the really corroded rusted ones
yeah this is a one of the super corroded exhaust pipe bolts that i was taking out
this guy look at that not spanking new but it's pretty pitted and corroded
from before but now that i've taken it back down to bare metal it looks pretty good
so i sprayed some of the clear coat onto here and i got it pretty much all nice and sealed up now
i turned it over sprayed both sides you can notice that once i sprayed the clear on a lot of these
bolts that were kind of silverish and polished before they actually turn back to their original
color or the color they're supposed to be so the dust from the from the polishing it just
soaked up into the clear so it's just a it's just like a matte clear so this stuff's pretty sealed
up now so it's good enough for the protection i need on the especially in florida where we don't
get much corrosion anyways hey guys thanks for tuning in all the way to the end of this video
on restoring those bolts those rusted and corroded bolts on my car if you guys found
this video useful give it a thumbs up if you guys want to stay up to date on all my projects on my
lexus is 300 project or my is 250 project or my sienna or anything i do around the garage that's
interesting and useful go ahead and subscribe to your channel so and i want to thank you guys for
watching all the way to the end of this video and i'll talk to you guys next time on the next video