On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 05:18:06 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

I am (very slowly) renovating houses on the side to turn them into
rentals - future retirement income. On my current project house, a
pump type soap dispenser began to leak on the edge of the kitchen sink
soon after I bought the house. I ignored the soap scum and pulled the
sink for reuse after I reconfigured the kitchen. Half a year later, I
was ready to reinstall the sink and I tried to clean the soap scum off
and there were half a dozen rust spots (about 3/16 dia) in the
stainless under soap scum. I knocked the red rust down when cleaning
the sink but now I am left with black spots (that I suspect will
return to red rust if they get wet). I have considered trying to buff
the spots (pits?) out with a scotch bright pad on my right angle die
grinder. Anyone have experiance with trying to buff rust out of
stainless? How deep might I need to buff?

You will need to remove all the pitted area and then you will need to
polish the ground/sanded/scotchbrighted area to at least a reasonable
facsimile of the existing sink finish.

Or a quick and dirty way is to use a "stainless passivater" which is
usually hydrochloric acid - the stuff I use is about 20%, which will
remove the corrosion. However, my experience (mostly on boats) is that
the shinier the finish the more "stainless" it is.

You can probably do this with an electric drill with some sort of
spindle to hold the buffing pads if it is a one time project.



Bruce-in-Bangkok
(correct email address for reply)