I wanted to post my experience with this so as to help others who might
try this. When I went about trying to gather all of the necessary
pieces together for this type of rust removal, I had the hardest time
finding a power source.

You see, it seems that many modern battery charges are equipped with
some kind of polarity protection (or some such nonsense). This
prevented the chargers (2 different ones) I purchased from providing
current to my rust removal system. Presumably they wanted a battery at
the end of the cables.

So after a few curses I asked for advice from a robot-building friend
familiar with chargers and the dark magic of electricity. He
recommended a _power supply_. While the goal of a battery charger is to
fully charge a battery then turn off, a power supply will churn out
electrons so long as it's plugged in.

So a trip to Gateway Electronics and $50 later (which yielded a 14V 5A
power supply, some wires, clips, a cheap soldering iron and solder) I
was in business.

Anyway, I would highly recommend getting one of them power supplies if
you're looking to remove rust. That is if you don't have an old battery
charger and are left having to buy a new-fangled one.


FWIW


Here's a link describing electrolytic rust removal in detail:

http://www.bhi.co.uk/hints/rust.htm

and one for Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...=Google+Search