On Sunday, August 11, 2013 8:22:24 PM UTC-4, Ed Huntress wrote:



When you abrade an oily cast iron surface, such as when you grind or

sand it to clean it, you smear both the oil and the graphite around on

the surface. You can't just abrade cast iron and expect to get a good

solder or braze bond because of that.



Anyway, we now return you to practical issues. d8-)



--

Ed Huntress

First my recommendation is to repair the press as a learning exercise. Repairing it will take too much time to be really worthwhile.

But here is something that some one might try. Using a neon sign transformer to generate plasma to clean the surface of cast iron that has be abraded.. It is not something that I have tried. I just have not needed to weld or braze any cast iron since I thought of using plasma. But the plasma from a neon sign transformer ought to oxidise both grease and grapbite. Using plasma to clean grass surfaces before mirror coating is well known. But I have not heard of anyone using it to clean cast iron surfaces.

If anyone tries this, please post your results. It should work, but one experiment is worth ten thousand conjectures.

Dan