never was any good at cooking

i thought i was making soup, but it turned out to be bread, check this:

after a night in the tank i came back to find this. Looks promising. and i did indeed find soup underneath after the bread topping was removed. After a quick scrub with wire wool you can clearly see the part of the rim that wasn't submerged. - rust free!

Seems to be a success, just takes a bit of time for the process to work. It may even have been better had i not been so impatient to get things started and actually scrubbed off the zinc from the other steel plate, as you can see this seemed to hinder the process somewhat.
This whole plate should be rusty now really.

Stupidly i somehow managed to blow the fuse (at least i hope thats all it is) in my power supply so no more play until i get another.

welding catchup

More welding, this time the front outrigger and front end of the sill.
Now I had to change my original plan to patch up the outrigger and had to go for a more ruthless approach. Why? well because firstly I found out that my welding skills are not yet honed enough to allow me to weld upside down (overhead?), the small bit I managed was solid but not very pretty and more importantly the spatter caused me serious pain, oh and I found more rust inside there than I originally suspected, this is what probably caused the spatter too I guess?

so out with the dremmel and cutting disc and whop off another chunk of the outrigger, in hindsight I really should just have drilled out all the spot welds and made up a new outrigger but I like keeping as much original steel as possible, and the way that the outriggers overlap each other it might have turned out to be even more trouble that way.

so off comes more, my attempt at patching it can be seen on the bit hanging off.

I bent up a new repair panel that made sure I had a normal(ish) welding position plus a few over head plug welds.

and welded.

with this done I then spent 10 minutes staring at, tapping, caressing and generally admiring my handy work before I started on making the next stupidly over elaborate repair panels.

Now these bits are going to be hidden under another panel and will never ever ever be seen again (hopefully) but me and my OCD just had to make it right.... and then I ran out of time for the day so didn't get to weld them in.

and welded again.

this brings us up to date with where the welding is atm. I'm now post holiday and ready to get going again.

soup de loop

well went for a man sized piece for the first real test and it started making up quite a brew within the first couple of hours.... started with this, the spare wheel from the austin. Been wanting to get this sandblasted or something for a while, so since this is virtually free thought i'd give it a go.

Not overly rusty as you can see so might come up quite nicely. I'm also wondering how effective it will be at removing the paint around the rusty bits.

the soup beginning to cook. I've left it to do it's stuff overnight, so i'll have to take trip to the workshop tonight to see how it turns out.

Electricity and water

always wanted to try some rust removal using electrolysis and having the workspace i do gave me a good opportunilty. Mixing the 'forbidden' water and electricity combo is always exciting too.

So i went to the harwdare / lifestyle / car parts shop / work and got me what i needed.

an old computer case for the anode (yes i had to sand the zinc coating off), some cheap jump leads
(they really look like they would melt at the first sign of car battery sized currents, but super for 12v and 3 amps) a big plastic tub and some washing soda (not pictured).

I made up a terminal for the connection to the anode chucked in some washing soda and some water connected it all up and flipped the switch (i had earlier in the year made a bench power supply from an old computer power).

so hopefully i'll have rust removal without too much effort and practically free.

The first test pieced fizzed away for an hour before i had to trundle off home so i didn't get chance to really see any noticeable results.