Stainless Steel Cleaner For Headers

[NitroDann]

Dural is out in the country ?

[bruce]

Dural sounds like Rural.

[Dupain]

Dural is out in the country ?

OA works great. Threw some rusted garden tools and an old hammer in too. Like new now.

The headers have been in the OA bath for another 24hrs now and all the rust related cover is now gone.

Acid Wash next. 6% HCl (also from Bunnings) $10 for 5 Litres, (Phosphoric available @3% but HCl is way more corrosive) to remove scaling and discolouration. Do this out side and wear protective gear.

Pretty sure there were horses and cows in paddocks out at Dural.

[Dupain]

Acid Wash. Brushed on 6% HCl and leave on. Repeat a few times.



Brush off scaling with stainless steel brush and wash off.





Will thrown this end in OA tonight to remove the last of the rust.




Procedure

1. QA wash for 1.5 days. QA 2kg @ $27. (Removes rust via a chemical reaction, so can any concentrated solution you like, strength proportional to time to clean - I chucked in the whole 2kg.)

2. Acid Wash (I painted it on with 6% HCl acid from Bunnings @ $10 for 2 L). Works on corrosive properties of the acid so the stronger the acid the quicker it will peel. 600g/L is 6%. some fancy acids on sale with fancy labels cost more but only are around 300g/L which is 3%.

3. Brush off residue.

4. Wash with detergent.

(Can polish with wet/dry sand paper @ 800 and 1200 if you want to).

I found the end result satisfactory for the effort involved. If I had to do it again, I would use a BIN for the OA wash and also for the HCL acid wash - buy say 20L and use dilute to a 2% HCl solution and let it work over a few days. This will produce a uniform and smooth finish as well as working on 100% of the insides too. Was not keen on having HCl bath around the house for a few days with dogs and kids around. It is high dangerous stuff. Disposed after neutralising with some detergent and down the sink.

HKS Super Header reconditioned!

[Dupain]

Won't be installed for at least another week.

Will be in the QA bath till then. The Oxalic Acid will gently eat into the 4-2-1 section of the headers to produce a smooth finish.

Then a "Vodka Wash". Prior driving home after install, will clean and coat the headers with Methylated Spirits to ensure no finger marks/stains and to produce a bronze/blue tinge.

[fastfreddygassit]

Great work. Excellent write-up!

[wun911]

I take it is too big to fit in a dish washer?

[Dupain]

Before fitment this week, I gave it a final rub with a Polish, then washed with detergent and dried with Methylated Spirits. It's clean and smooth. You can still see some darker areas of scaling on the surface but to get this off, it'll need wet sanding.

[Okibi]

Awesome effort!

[Mr Morlock]

One thing I did not follow is - 600g/L is 6%. and 300g/l is 3%. - would it not be 60G and 30G?. Guess it also must have been powder form i.e. grams

[Dupain]

One thing I did not follow is - 600g/L is 6%. and 300g/l is 3%. - would it not be 60G and 30G?. Guess it also must have been powder form i.e. grams

Comes in a solution eg 600g/L conc. Dilute 10 times to get 6%.

[Dupain]

Installed the headers finally. Commissioned MX5mania to do the job. They were great. I was waiting for the car in the waiting room and you could have thought you were in amazon.com's warehouse. They were sending stuff to all corners of Australia.

[cookie]

Hi, just wanted to say thanks for the information. Just received my na6 headers and are completely rusted, wire brushed them then sanded one pipe with 120g paper and took forever to find something resembling shiny metal. Would the first product mentioned work in my situation where it's heavily rusted? I like your wheelie bin idea...thankfully no kids/pets around my place and no rush to install

[lizard]

- edit Okibi - no point quoting the post directly above -

Soda blasting is how I would do it

[Mr Morlock]

there are probably a number of ways to clean them up. It may not be accurate to actually refer to rust as the main problem. Even the subject headers were referred to as stainless steel and most will understand that usually implies very little rust. Even if they are cleaned up and polished how does one keep that appearance- much harder than say a cam cover. The reality is that most exhausts are black and hidden away. Exhausts can also have protective coatings applied but whether thats worth it is debatable. If one does take an exhaust or virtually any metal part to be painted or treated it goes into a treatment bath first - all plating processes do the sane i.e. for clean etching etc. Insofar as a bath is concerned i.e. something that the headers can sit in you can buy products like baths for pets and they are relatively cheap or even a builders barrow might be suitable.