First things first, I want to thank FlashHarry from over on the TRD forum (
trd2000gt.forumotion.com) for putting me on to this great product.
I am in process of doing a wheel refurb project and the hardware I am working with is quite old and dirty having seen many years of brake dust, rain, road grease, and general wear and tear. Combine this with constant heat cycling from brake radiant heat and also corrosion which occurs naturally in iron, steel, and many alloys (with time) and you have yourself a real mess on your hands.
FlashHarry was helping me out with sourcing some parts (which were old but looked like new) and I asked him - how does he get his stuff so clean? so he sent me on some photos and a link to Bilt Hamber deox C. Really I was having trouble believing what I was seeing so I had to try it for myself and promptly ordered myself a 1kg pack which will make up to 20 litres of rust remover. (pictured here next to a bottle of Belgom, my next write up
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For dip treatment, the deox C is a powder based formula that you mix with water. Bilt Hamber also have a gel type that is for big articles that you are not able to dip, I'm going to cover this in a separate writeup. So the first step is to get a plastic container, put in your rusty/corroded parts and pour on some bilt hamber. For this example I used 50ml of powder and 1950ml of water - 1 part powder to 19 water. The instructions suggest that for really heavy corrosion you can mix at 1:4 however I wanted to be a little gentle on the wheel bolts so figured I would use the minimum
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Bilt Hamber suggest that to speed up the dissolving of the product in the water, that you use water up to 50 degrees centigrade so I added some hot tap water, gave the mix a wriggle around with my hands and within a few seconds you could see that there was action afoot. The instructions suggest to leave the mix for at least 20 minutes and that some agitation or brushing may be necessary for ingrained rust. I left it overnight to have a good soaking and gave some minor stirring now and then for good measure.
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The next step is to remove the pieces from the dip and rinse. I chose to also give a quick rub over with an old toothbrush, but in honesty most of the corrosion had actually fallen off much to my amazement.
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Here is a closeup of what was otherwise a very rusty steel nut
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I gave all of the nuts a rinse over a few times in fresh water and now they are mostly in great shape and certainly a hell of a lot better than when I started. I was actually thinking about throwing them away and buying new ones they looked so bad. The reason there are no wheel bolts in this picture also is that I took them out earlier as they were not as dirty as the nuts and I wanted to be as gentle on them as possible. Having said that they were quite tarnished and had deposits of dirt/much stuck heavilly to them (so much so that a dremel with autosol would not easilly shift it) and they came out of the Bilt Hamber squeeky clean and just about not even needing a polish.
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Here are some before and after pictures to reinforce the difference at hand here. On the left 'treated with deox C' on the right 'prior to treatment with deox C'
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On top - deox C, on the bottom prior to deox C
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Note that on the treated nut it looks like there is rust in the threads, this is not the case. What you can see there is some loctite style sealant that is put on at the factory to hold the nut on the wheel bolt.
Let me also point out that I had already conducted some cleaning on my wheel bolts/nuts trying the 'coca cola' method of leaving them sit for two days in a bottle of coke. This did not work. It did clean to some extent, even more so when I brushed them with a toothbrush, but to be honest it was a waste of time. I could have saved myself a lot of time (and coke) by just using the Bilt Hamber first which produces an excellent result with ease.
What's next?
Well next I am going to be polishing the wheel bolts with Belgom (seen at the start of this post) and the wheel nuts will be painted with some silver hammerite for paint protection prior to being assembled in the alloys.
Once again thanks to FlashHarry for the great tip!
Deox C is available from the Bilt Hamber website at: http://www.bilthamber.com/
At the time of writing I purchased a 1kg tub for 13 pounds plus shipping. They shipped very fast and I received it within three working days.
