Monday, June 8, 2009

In other news

The pump for the Kerosafe FINALLY arrived. USPS took their sweet dang time getting it here. Of course the leather was all dried out but a little time in an ATF bath fixed that. The next problem is the check valve leaks badly. Its possible a little soak in PB Blaster will free that up. I'll do that when I get back from California in a couple weeks.
Actually if I was smart I'd get it into the Blaster now....

200A painting

Paint on the 200A fount has progressed. Its pretty much done, I just need to figure a way to get paint into the lip on the base. To do it well I'll need to mask the base some, before I do that I want to let the paint dry and harden, its handy I'm going away for awhile...

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Coleman paint underway

I don't know what came over me but Monday at lunch I took the drill with a wire wheel and ground the decal off the Coleman lantern... With the decal gone I just HAD to paint it. So over the next 30 minutes or so I used the drill, angle grinder and dremel to grind all the paint and most of the rust off. I found the date stamp on the bottom, 11/71 which makes this lantern older than I'd expected. I also found a fair amount of rust. Once the paint was taken off I inverted the fount and filled the base with Metal Ready. Metal Ready is an acid which will eat the rust off if its left alone for awhile.

After a few hours the base looked pretty good but there was still a lot of rust on the sides so I put it in a bucket with some washing soda and an iron bar for electrolysis. The nice thing about electrolysis is you don't lose any good metal and it makes a really nice finish. I let that run all night, rotated the found 180 degrees and let it run until lunch Tuesday.

At lunch I pulled it out, cleaned it off good and hit it with primer. Its going to take several coats of primer to build up in the rust pits. The primer also shows all the dents and dings in the fount, this thing is a disaster. Oh well, I knew that going in. I'm not going to bother with the dents and dings but I do want the rust pits filled in. It'll probably be a few days before I'm ready to paint. I need to get another color of primer so I can alternate to more easily be sure the pits are filled in...

I think I've got a better vent sourced. Who knows, this thing might turn out yet.