Gittin'th Rust Out (with pics)

Because I am having such a hard time transferring the pictures I have had to break this procedure into sections in order to put it in this forum. I would appreciate any help from any GURU on the 'Photo' section of VFRWorld in making photo transfers faster than my current method allows.

Surface Rust Removal ​

1. PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION & SETTING UP THE SYSTEM

I want to thank all the contributors to the original thread : “Tank Rust? Any consensus on best fix?”. But I have to give a special thanks to :hail: ‘uberchuckie’ who pointed us all to the web guy in Ottawa, Canada :canada:, and his presentation of the electrolysis method of rust removal.

All the history about the rust in my 82 Vf 750c is in the original thread so that anyone desiring to follow it can find it in the “dead threads” under the title given above. But to recollect what happened to the V45 when I tried to start and run it after a complete carburetor rebuild I direct you to the first picture. If I had known then what I know now I could have been cleaning the tank (s) while I rebuilt the carburetors.



The fact that the fuel was discolored in the inline filter was not really a concern at first. I thought the filter would do it’s thing and I that had been brilliant in predicting that I would need the in line filter to begin and end with. But no such luck. Pride goes before a fall. Lets look at the difference between the fuel from the gas station pump and the fuel after it had percolated through both the main and the reserve tank on the Magna. Big color change huh?




So I ended up crying for mercy in the 1st and 2nd Generation Forum. I had a rust problem even if it were simply surface rust. I had to find a way to get it out. The stuff in the bottom of the bucket in the attached photo is what I wanted to get out. That is what this thread is about.




I got a lot of advice saying I should buy a tank coating product of one or another brand. And that might have been good advice except that it came from the east or mid west where tanks rot through because of rust. I had a motorcycle that had spent it’s whole life in the So California’s medium high desert (between LA and Palm Springs). It had not seen so much water in it that it had rusted through. It had seen 13 years of sitting empty, in a drafty garage or carport, condensing water out of the air on those rare occasions when there was sufficient moisture in the air and the dew point was sufficiently high enough to allow for condensation in the desert. It happens but not all that often, certainly not as often as most of the rest of the country, and certainly not in the quantities of moisture condensed out as in the mid west :rain:, not to mention Canada :smow: . (I have clear recollections of coming out in the mornings in Lexington, Ky to find the entire car covered @ ¼ in thick with dew).

So my problem was to get out the surface rust as best possible. There were several suggestions but the one that I chose was the electrolysis method suggested by ‘uberchuckie’ and the unnamed contributor from a web in Ottawa. I think it was the right choice in my case and probably for anyone else, especially as a start to removing all the rust inside a tank prior to coating the inside of a tank that has pin holes etc.

What’s presented here is not ‘the order that must be followed’. It’s merely how I remember going about it.

First you need to gather up some necessary parts and supplies.

The parts:

1. A battery charger, the bigger the charger (amp wise) the faster the rust will be removed. A 10-12 amp charger is more than enough to do a typical motorcycle tank in a day or two, and a typical smaller automatic 4- 6 amp charger will work as well, only take longer.



2. You need something to use for an anode. I found the preferred anode for a small necked motorcycle tank was a single piece of ½ inch rebar about 12 to 15 inches long is probably enough for a typical tank. To get more surface area you could attach short pieces to the part of the rebar near the cork. but there are problems with that: See the photo below.



3. A cork or rubber stopper chosen to fit the tank filler opening . It will have to be drilled to accommodate the rebar while maintaining electrical isolation of the rebar from the tank itself. Buy a stopper sufficiently large in diameter to not fall through the filler hole when pushed down in order to make it fit tightly and hold the rebar in place while the electrolysis takes place. See attached photo.


4. Various buckets for mixing and storing the electrolyte solution.



5. A dedicated AC outlet with adequate breaker to power /protect the battery charger.

6. Elastic gloves.

7. A funnel for pouring electrolyte solution into the fuel tank.

8. Paper towels and stuff to soak up spilled electrolyte.

9. There are some other things that you will need that will be explained through the course of this explanation.

The rebar bought at my local hardware store was straight as seen above. The lower rebar piece has been bent in order to get it into the tank as far as possible. You need an acetylene torch to bend the rebar. The cork stopper was also bought at the hardware store. The bent anode uses the cork stopper to both insulate the rebar from the side of the tank filler hole and hold the rebar in a cantilevered position inside the tank. For reasons that will become apparent later, try to bend the rebar in a single plane. If you do otherwise you might not be able to use the same bent rebar for both sides of the tank. Of course you can make an anode for each side of a tank if you so desire. The surface area issue is dependent on the angles you have to work with in order to get the 'anode' into the tank. The choice of the cork stopper was financial. A rubber stopper will work just as well, probably even better. I also chose a cork stopper because it was easier to drill than a rubber stopper. However, the rubber stopper can be used over and over if you intend to clean out more than one tank. The cork stopper had a tendency to come apart because it was made of very porous cork. A better quality of cork would last longer. The picture shown above illustrates the angled drill hole in the cork. The angled hole was necessary in order to do the main tank in two steps, left and right sides respectively. This is also the reason you want to bend the rebar in one plane. Before moving on I want to point out one thing that can be clearly seen in the detailed photo of the cork shown above. Notice that there is a coat of rust on the rebar. The rebar acts as the ‘Anode’ in the electrolysis process. The rebar is ‘plated’ with rust. If you look at the shadow of the rebar on the table top you will see that the shadow of the rebar edge shows the rust coating to have a prickly, hairy sort of look to it. The “hair” is the accumulation of rust into little spines during the electrolysis process. You can compare this rusted surface of the ‘anode’, which is submerged in the electrolyte to the clean end on the other side of the stopper that acts as the battery charger positive lead attachment point.



As for supplies, besides paper towels, you need to get some “washing soda”. This you may find impossible to find depending on where you live. I could not find it over two days of looking. But not to worry, “washing soda” is just another name for sodium carbonate. And sodium carbonate is derived from cooking ‘sodium bicarbonate’ in an oven for an hour at 350F. Cooking drives one of the carbonate molecules off the larger ‘bicarbonate’ molecule in the form of CO2. This is why another name for sodium carbonate is “soda ash”, which is commonly used to control acidity in swimming pools.



So if you can’t find “washing soda” at your grocery store you can find it at the pool store or at WalMart or Home Depot during the summer swimming season. If you can’t locate “store bought soda ash” then just buy a box of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda (sodium bicarbonate) and spread it on a cookie sheet and cook it in your oven for an hour at 350F. ‘Voila’, Sodium Carbonate at your service.

You need to put “soda ash” or whatever you want to call it, in the water you use as the electrolyte. Most plain tap water is too neutral for good conduction of electrons between anode and cathode. Using distilled water is an unnecessary expense and basically no help regarding electron transfer. Tap water is sufficient. You need to mix the “soda ash” into the water in a bucket before you put it in the tank. Make sure you have mixed it to the point where the water is clear, not cloudy. No need or benefit in putting excessive amounts of 'soda ash' in the water. About half a cup of soda ash will do for most common sized gas tank capacities (2 to 3 gallons). It does not require special gloves to work with the soda ash. It need not be any more caustic than pool water. Just enough base to promote electrolysis. After you have mixed the electrolyte, if you have an ohmmeter, you can try the experiment described below regarding what resistance you might expect to see if you check for resistance between the cathode and anode. Hold the ends of the ohmmeter in the electrolyte mixture, and note the resistance using the leads placed in electrolyte by themselves. Then take the anode and hold one of the leads against it while it is immersed in the electrolyte along with the second ohmmeter lead. This little experiment will give you an idea of what resistance you should see when seting up the anode blindly. You should see resistance between 2000 and 200 ohms. I think a mix of 1 cup to 5 gallons water was mentioned elsewhere. So that 2 lb container of Soda Ash that was pictured above is more than enough to make 30 gallons of electrolyte. It was the smallest amount I could buy. It was on sale @ $4.00 reduced from $6.00.


As was shown above, the rebar used as the anode had to be bent to get it as far as possible into the Magna tank. This was done for a reason. The electrolysis process is dependent on “line of sight”. So the inside tank walls that can “see” the anode hanging inside the tank will produce the bubbling action that strips the rust from the walls of the tank. I wanted the anode to extend horizontally as far as possible toward the tail or seat end of the tank so it would see as much surface area of the inside walls as possible. As is the case for most motorcycles, the Magna tank has a hump or rise in the middle of the bottom of the tank. The top of the hump can be seen lurking in the filler hole surrounded by the rust on the filler seal flange and neck of the filler hole.



The tank was photographed after I put gasoline through the tank and after an initial experiment WRT the electrolysis method, using a coat hanger as an anode. Therefore, most of the rust on the hump under the filler has been removed prior to the photograph. The coat hanger anode appears in the picture of the ohmmeter that will appear during the explanation of setting up the Left Hand Side (LHS) of the tank for electrolysis. In the Magna’s case, the hump is there to allow room for the air filter and the box it is contained in to reside under the main tank. Therefore it will be necessary to strip the rust inside the tank in two stages, one side of the tank at a time. How this was done with one anode will be shown in the photographs that follow.

To prepare the tank to hold the electrolyte solution you have to block up any openings that would allow the electrolyte to escape from the tank. I have attached a grey colored piece of fuel line to the vapor collector line. It has a on/off valve on the other end to stop electrolyte from escaping if the tank is over full. The valve is left open during electrolysis to allow foam to escape.



You need to prepare the tank for the electrical connection to the negative (cathode) lead of the battery charger in order for the tank interior to act as the “cathode”, or negative side of the electrolysis system.




To affect a good connection of the alligator clips of the battery charger to the cathode and the anode you should clean the sulfate build up on the copper clips before hook up.



Then I installed the cathode clip on the reserve tank cross over pipe because I would not have access to the underneath part of the tank once the electrolyte was installed.



2. INSTALLATION OF ELECTROLYTE, ANODE AND BEGINNING OF ELECTROLYSIS


You are ready to lay the tank on its bottom edges and fill the tank with electrolyte solution.



The picture of the filled tank below was taken after the first run to remove rust from the LHS of the tank. So the filler neck does not appear as rusted as it was initially rusted, but there is overflow rust solution dried on the top of the tank surrounding the filler hole. This is an indication of the sort of mess doing this is.

Now it is time to install the anode. One little modification was tried here to help from having the end of the anode come in contact with the cathode (LHS wall of the tank). A grocery store rubber band from a group of broccoli or asparagus was wrapped around the end of the anode to insulate it if it touched the wall of the tank (cathode).



The anode with insulated tip was then inserted into the left hand side of the tank in stages until it dropped down and was fully installed longitudinally inside the LHS of the tank. In order to affect this installation it is necessary to turn the bent anode while dropping it into the tank. When the anode is fully inside the left side of the tank the connection point will be slanted to the right side of the tank and the end of the anode (rebar) sticking out of the stopper exposed above the filler hole of the tank.

 

Because I am having such a hard time transferring the pictures I have had to break this procedure into sections in order to put it in this forum. I would appreciate any help from any GURU on the Photo section of VFRWorld in making photo transfers faster than my current method allows.



Surface Rust Removal

1. PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION & SETTING UP THE SYSTEM

I want to thank all the contributors to the original thread : “Tank Rust? Any consensus on best fix?”. But I have to give a special thanks to ‘uberchuckie’ who pointed us all to the web guy in Ottawa, Canada, and his presentation of the electrolysis method of rust removal.

All the history about the rust in my 82 Vf 750c is in the original thread so that anyone desiring to follow it can find it in the “dead threads” under the title given above. But to recollect what happened to the V45 when I tried to start and run it after a complete carburetor rebuild I direct you to the first picture. If I had known then what I know now I could have been cleaning the tank (s) while I rebuilt the carburetors.



The fact that the fuel was discolored in the inline filter was not really a concern at first. I thought the filter would do it’s thing and I that had been brilliant in predicting that I would need the in line filter to begin and end with. But no such luck. Pride goes before a fall. Lets look at the difference between the fuel from the gas station pump and the fuel after it had percolated through both the main and the reserve tank on the Magna. Big color change huh?



So I ended up crying for mercy in the 1st and 2nd Generation Forum. I had a rust problem even if it were simply surface rust. I had to find a way to get it out. The stuff in the bottom of the bucket in the attached photo is what I wanted to get out. That is what this thread is about.



I got a lot of advice saying I should buy a tank coating product of one or another brand. And that might have been good advice except that it came from the east or mid west where tanks rot through because of rust. I had a motorcycle that had spent it’s whole life in the So California’s medium high desert (between LA and Palm Springs). It had not seen so much water in it that it had rusted through. It had seen 13 years of sitting empty, in a drafty garage or carport, condensing water out of the air on those rare occasions when there was sufficient moisture in the air and the dew point was sufficiently high enough to allow for condensation in the desert. It happens but not all that often, certainly not as often as most of the rest of the country, and certainly not in the quantities of moisture condensed out as in the mid west, not to mention Canada. (I have clear recollections of coming out in the mornings in Lexington, Ky to find the entire car covered @ ¼ in thick with dew).

So my problem was to get out the surface rust as best possible. There were several suggestions but the one that I chose was the electrolysis method suggested by ‘uberchuckie’ and the unnamed contributor from a web in Ottawa. I think it was the right choice in my case and probably for anyone else, especially as a start to removing all the rust inside a tank prior to coating the inside of a tank that has pin holes etc.

What’s presented here is not ‘the order that must be followed’. It’s merely how I remember going about it.

First you need to gather up some necessary parts and supplies. The parts:
1. A battery charger, the bigger the charger (amp wise) the faster the rust will be removed. A 10-12 amp charger is more than enough to do a typical motorcycle tank in a day or two, and a typical smaller automatic 4- 6 amp charger will work as well, only take longer.
2. You need something to use for an anode. I found the preferred anode for a small necked motorcycle tank was a single piece of ½ inch rebar about 12 to 15 inches long is probably enough for a typical tank. See the photo below.




3. A cork or rubber stopper chosen to fit the tank filler opening . It will have to be drilled to accommodate the rebar while maintaining electrical isolation of the rebar from the tank itself. Buy a stopper sufficiently large in diameter to not fall through the filler hole when pushed down in order to make it fit tightly and hold the rebar in place while the electrolysis takes place. See attached photo.



4. Various buckets for mixing and storing the electrolyte solution.



5. A dedicated AC outlet with adequate breaker to power /protect the battery charger.
6. Elastic gloves.
7. A funnel for pouring electrolyte solution into the fuel tank.
8. Paper towels and stuff to soak up spilled electrolyte.
9. There are some other things that you will need that will be explained through the course of this explanation.

The original straight rebar bought at my local hardware store is seen above. The lower rebar piece has been bent in order to get it into the tank as far as possible. You need an acetylene torch to bend the rebar. The cork stopper was also bought at the hardware store. The bent anode uses the cork stopper to both insulate the rebar from the side of the tank filler hole and hold the rebar in a cantilevered position inside the tank. For reasons that will become apparent later, try to bend the rebar in a single plane. If you do otherwise you might not be able to use the same bent rebar for both sides of the tank. Of course you can make an anode for each side of a tank if you so desire. The choice of the cork stopper was financial. A rubber stopper will work just as well, probably even better. I also chose a cork stopper because it was easier to drill than a rubber stopper. However, the rubber stopper can be used over and over if you intend to clean out more than one tank. The cork stopper had a tendency to come apart because it was made of very porous cork. A better quality of cork would last longer. The picture shown above illustrates the angled drill hole in the cork. The angled hole was necessary in order to do the main tank in two steps, left and right sides respectively. This is also the reason you want to bend the rebar in one plane. Before moving on I want to point out one thing that can be clearly seen in the detailed photo of the cork shown above. Notice that there is a coat of rust on the rebar. The rebar acts as the ‘Anode’ in the electrolysis process. The rebar is ‘plated’ with rust. If you look at the shadow of the rebar you will see that the shadow of the rebar edge shows the rust coating to have a prickly, hairy sort of look to it. The “hair” is the accumulation of rust into little spines during the electrolysis process. You can compare this rusted surface of the ‘anode’, which is submerged in the electrolyte solution placed in the tank, to the clean end on the other side of the stopper that acts as the battery charger positive lead attachment point.



As for supplies, besides paper towels, you need to get some “washing soda”. This you may find impossible to find depending on where you live. I could not find it over two days of looking. But not to worry, “washing soda” is just another name for sodium carbonate. And sodium carbonate is derived from cooking ‘sodium bicarbonate’ in an oven for an hour at 350F. Cooking drives one of the carbonate molecules off the larger ‘bicarbonate’ molecule in the form of CO2. This is why another name for sodium carbonate is “soda ash”, which is commonly used to control acidity in swimming pools.



So if you can’t find “washing soda” at your grocery store you can find it at the pool store or at WalMart or Home Depot during the summer swimming season. If you can’t locate “store bought soda ash” then just buy a box of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda (sodium bicarbonate) and spread it on a cookie sheet and cook it in your oven for an hour at 350F. ‘Voila’, Sodium Carbonate at your service.

You need to put “soda ash” or whatever you want to call it, in the water you use as the electrolyte. Most plain tap water is too neutral for good conduction of electrons between anode and cathode. Using distilled water is an unnecessary expense and basically no help regarding electron transfer. Tap water is sufficient. You need to mix the “soda ash” into the water in a bucket before you put it in the tank. Make sure you have mixed it to the point where the water is clear, not cloudy. No need or benefit in putting excessive amounts of soda ash in the water. About half a cup of soda ash will do for most common sized gas tank capacities (2 to 3 gallons). It does not require special gloves to work with the soda ash. It need not be any more caustic than pool water. Just enough base to promote electrolysis. I think a mix of 1 cup to 5 gallons water was mentioned elsewhere. So that 2 lbs of Soda Ash that was pictured is enough to make 30 gallons of electrolyte. It was the smallest amount I could buy. It was on sale @ $4.00 reduced from $6.00.




As was shown above the rebar used as the anode had to be bent to get it as far as possible into the Magna tank. This was done for a reason. The electrolysis process is dependent on “line of sight”. So the inside tank walls that can “see” the anode hanging inside the tank will produce the bubbling action that strips the rust from the walls of the tank. I wanted the anode to extend horizontally as far as possible toward the tail or seat end of the tank so it would see as much surface area of the inside walls as possible. As is the case for most motorcycles, the Magna tank has a hump or rise in the middle of the bottom of the tank. The top of the hump can be seen lurking in the filler hole surrounded by the rust on the filler seal flange and neck of the filler hole. The tank was photographed after I put gasoline through the tank and after an initial experiment WRT the electrolysis method, using a coat hanger as an anode. Therefore, most of the rust on the hump under the filler has been removed prior to the photograph. The coat hanger anode appears in the picture of the ohmmeter that will appear during the explanation of setting up the Left Hand Side (LHS) of the tank for electrolysis. In the Magna’s case, the hump is there to allow room for the air filter and the box it is contained in to reside under the main tank. Therefore it will be necessary to strip the rust inside the tank in two stages, one side of the tank at a time. How this was done with one anode will be shown in the photographs that follow.



To prepare the tank to hold the electrolyte solution you have to block up any openings that would allow the electrolyte to escape from the tank. I have attached a grey colored piece of fuel line to the vapor collector line. It has a on/off valve on the other end to stop electrolyte from escaping if the tank is over full. The valve will be left open during electrolysis to allow foam to escape.



And you need to prepare the tank for the electrical connection to the negative (cathode) lead of the battery charger in order for the tank interior to act as the “cathode”, or negative side of the electrolysis system.




To affect a good connection of the alligator clips of the battery charger to the cathode and the anode you should clean the sulfate build up on the copper clips before hook up.




Then I installed the cathode clip on the reserve tank cross over pipe because I would not have access to the underneath part of the tank once the electrolyte was installed.



More to come in parts 2 and 3. Help with photo transfer will be greatly appreciated. DKC







2. INSTALLATION OF ELECTROLYTE, ANODE AND BEGINNING OF ELECTROLYSIS


Then I was ready to lay the tank on its bottom edges and fill the tank with electrolyte solution.



The picture of the filled tank below was taken after the first run to remove rust from the LHS of the tank. So the filler neck does not appear as rusted as it was initially rusted, but there is overflow rust solution dried on the top of the tank surrounding the filler hole.

Now it is time to install the anode. One little modification was tried here to help from having the end of the anode come in contact with the cathode (LHS wall of the tank). A grocery store rubber band from a group of broccoli or asparagus was wrapped around the end of the anode to insulate it if it touched the wall of the tank (cathode). The anode with insulated tip was then inserted into the left hand side of the tank in stages until it dropped down and was fully installed longitudinally inside the LHS of the tank. In order to affect this installation it is necessary to turn the bent anode while dropping it into the tank. When the anode is fully inside the left side of the tank the connection point will be slanted to the right side of the tank and the end of the anode (rebar) sticking out of the stopper exposed above the filler hole of the tank.

The stopper is pushed in while you attempt to find a middle point between the outer left wall and the inside left wall of the hump. To find the mid point you rotate the anode and the stopper about the edge of the filler neck to find the position midway between contacting either wall. Having the anode and cathode touch is tantamount to a short circuit. That can cause a fire, and make a general mess out of everything at night when you are in bed unaware of a problem. This is the most important safety issue about the electrolysis method. In the case of cleaning the inside of a motorcycle tank the position of the anode vis the cathode is BLIND to you. You need to be careful when setting up the anode position inside the tank BLIND.

There is a way to test that the anode and cathode are separated. Attach an Ohmmeter to the anode and cathode (with the ohmmeter on the lowest or no more than 2000 ohms (continuity test position) resistance setting). Do this after you have decided you have found the correct position and the respective electrical “ends” of the system are not in contact, the following reading will occur. If the anode and cathode are not touching, your ohmmeter will show an initial infinite resistance reading before contact with the anode and cathode. A second or so later what was an infinite resistance reading will decrease in resistance to a reading between @ 2000 and 300 ohms. If the anode is not touching the cathode this is how the ohmmeter will react. You can check the operation of the ohmmeter by inserting its lead ends directly into the electrolyte mixture. How the ohmmeter reacts needs to be noted in expectation that it will react in a similar fashion when testing the anode/cathode for separation. As long as the reading does not go to zero (‘0’) ohms or some very small value like 1 or less ohms, your anode and cathode are separated by a gap of electrolyte. If the resistance reading does not drop but stays at 1Meg+ or 100’s of K ohms your electrolyte solution is too weak or you have a problem with the ohmmeter. You want to see that the meter measures a high resistance (open) initially that drops to no less than several hundred ohms in a matter of a second or so after beginning the reading. I used an electronic ohmmeter, but an analog ohmmeter should work if you watch the needle very carefully and know how your meter reacts when reading resistances on other devices (say like the magnetic pickups on your Vf).



This does not mean that some terrible thing might not happen overnight if the stopper does not hold the rebar in place or some other unforeseen thing happens to allow the cathode and anode to come into contact. So make sure that the battery charger is plugged into a protected ac receptacle that will kick out if anything should happen while you sleep. By the way, the coat hanger wire used for the initial test can be seen at the top center left of the above photo of the ohmmeter. And the ohmmeter is shown with a reading of ‘1’. That means that there is infinite resistance between the cathode and anode (necessarily so because I am not taking a reading while I take the picture).

So now that the anode is safely installed you can go ahead and install the positive battery lead on the anode end sticking out of the tank through the stopper.



When you have the positive lead hooked up its time to light up the electrolysis machine. Turn on the battery charger, making sure it does not kick out or spark or make any untoward noise when turned on. Set the charger to 10 to 12 amps if you have such a charger. If you have one of the old 6 amp auto- resistance regulating units just hook it up and watch how high the ammeter reads. The bubbling should start immediately. If you have an opening in the top of the tank you will see the electrolyte foaming out through it immediately, usually with rust color mixed in with the white of the bubbling electrolyte (See later photos of cleaning the reserve tank). My set up had a vent line for evaporated fuel capture that I left open. You can see this vent line as the grey fuel line in the photos above of the bottom of the tank when the tank is being plugged etc. Foam bubbled out of this line while I cleaned both sides of the tank. If the charger runs for a few seconds on high amperage and then kicks out you have a shorting problem with the anode touching the cathode. Readjust the position of the anode and try again. The system should run at near the max amperage rating that your charger is rated for at the start of electrolysis.



The above picture of the start of electrolysis is not very good. But if you look at the face of the charger you will see two red LED light lit on the far right hand side of the charger face. These are the “Manual” setting light ‘on’ and the “12 amp” setting light ‘on’. If you are familiar with this type if charger you might also notice that the red amperage indicator on the ammeter is pointing down and to the right hand side of the dial in the red portion to the right side of the ammeter dial. This is the typical ammeter reading at the beginning of charging a fully discharged battery (12+ amps). Over time the ammeter reading will change, much as if it were charging up a battery.



In the better picture of the battery charger shown above, after working all night to remove rust from the LHS of the main tank you will note that the red LED’s on the RHS of the charger show only that the 12 amp setting is lit. The manual setting LED light is off because it is now flashing the “automatic” setting light to indicate that it has kicked off of the manual setting and that the manual high charge rate is at an end. This photo caught the “automatic” light when it was flashing “off”. The Ammeter shows its indicator pointing to some place between 0 and 2 amps. This is how the ammeter reacts to the anode being coated with rust particles, as the following photograph will show.

The rust build up was completely around the rebar. I have brushed off the rust on one side to show the difference before and after running the electrolysis for the LHS for one night. What has happened is that the electrolysis process has essentially “plated the anode with a layer of rust”. More rust is still in suspension in the electrolyte solution. The anode will have all the rust removed from it before it is reinstalled to clean the RHS of the main tank. Remember that with the anode coated with this layer of rust it had completely shut down the amperage going through the electrolysis process. The rust must be removed any time it restricts the flow of amperage through the electrolyte. Also notice that the rust adhering to the anode is very fine and it coats like a layer of paint. This is because the Magna tank, a California surface rusted tank, had no large chunks of rust to break off and float to the Anode where they might be captured as was seen in the photos of the Ottawa rust forum. I think you get the nuts and bolts of the process from what has already been described here. If you have a far gone mid west or northern tank with severe rust then using the electrolysis method will be useful in clearing the tank of every speck of rust prior to coating the inside of the tank. There is one difficulty with the method that might require acid washing after rust removal, but I’ll get into that later.

The RHS of the main tank will be described next, it gets a better result than the LHS. The cleaning of the reserve tank is also described later with pictures of the foaming that can be expected to occur. Finally I show a pile of precipitated rust that was collected by successively pouring off the clear electrolyte taken out of the tank after the electrolysis process was ended.

The electrolytic method works extremely well and it’s cheap. In fact, it is the main way museums remove rust from metallic objects they intend to display.

DKC

 

Great post!!

Did an old tank a few years back by dumping in some graded sand and putting the tank in a 5 gallon paint shaker.

For some surface oxidation, several paint companies make a converter that turns iron oxide into magnetite. One is "Corroseal."

 

Part 2: install electrolyte/anode and start boiling



The stopper is pushed in while you attempt to find a middle point between the outer left wall and the inside left wall of the hump. To find the mid point you rotate the anode and the stopper about the edge of the filler neck to find the position midway between contacting either wall. Having the anode and cathode touch is tantamount to a short circuit. That can cause a fire :kaboom:, and make a general mess out of everything at night when you are in bed unaware of a problem. This is the most important safety issue about the electrolysis method. What you might burn up is your battery charger. There is very little chance that you'll ignite hydrogen as a result of electrolysis.

In the case of cleaning the inside of a motorcycle tank the position of the anode vis the cathode is BLIND to you. You need to be careful when setting up the anode position inside the tank BLIND.



There is a way to test that the anode and cathode are separated. Attach an Ohmmeter to the anode and cathode (with the ohmmeter on the lowest or no more than 2000 ohms (continuity test position) resistance setting). Do this after you have decided you have found the correct position and the respective electrical “ends” of the system are not in contact, the following reading will occur. If the anode and cathode are not touching, your ohmmeter will show an initial infinite resistance reading before contact with the anode and cathode. A second or so later, what was an infinite resistance reading will decrease in resistance to a reading between @ 2000 and 200 ohms. The actual resistance that the ohmmeter settles to will depend on the surface area of the anode and cathode inside the tank. If the anode is not touching the cathode this is how the ohmmeter will react. You can check the operation of the ohmmeter by inserting its lead ends directly into the electrolyte mixture. How the ohmmeter reacts needs to be noted in expectation that it will react in a similar fashion when testing the anode/cathode for separation. As long as the reading does not go to zero (‘0’) ohms or some very small value like 1 or less ohms, your anode and cathode are separated by a sufficient gap of electrolyte. If the resistance reading does not drop but stays at 1Meg+ or 100’s of K ohms your electrolyte solution is too weak or you have a problem with the ohmmeter. You want to see that the meter measures a high resistance (open) initially that drops to no less than several hundred ohms in a matter of a second or so after beginning the reading. I used an electronic ohmmeter, but an analog ohmmeter should work if you watch the needle very carefully and know how your meter reacts when reading resistances on other devices (say like the magnetic pickups on your Vf).


This does not mean that some terrible thing might not happen overnight if the stopper does not hold the rebar in place or some other unforeseen thing happens to allow the cathode and anode to come into contact. So make sure that the battery charger is plugged into a protected AC receptacle that will kick out if anything should happen while you sleep. By the way, the coat hanger wire used for the initial test can be seen at the top center left of the above photo of the ohmmeter. And the ohmmeter is shown with a reading of ‘1’. That means that there is infinite resistance between the cathode and anode (necessarily so because I am not taking a reading while I take the picture).




So now that the anode is safely installed you can go ahead and install the positive battery lead on the anode end sticking out of the tank (note that in this case it is sticking out to the right side) through the stopper.





When you have the positive lead hooked up its time to light up the 'electrolysis' machine. Turn on the battery charger, making sure it does not kick out or spark or make any untoward noise when turned on. Set the charger to 10 to 12 amps if you have such a charger. If you have one of the old 6 amp auto- resistance regulating units just hook it up and watch how high the ammeter reads. The bubbling should start immediately. If you have an opening in the top of the tank you will see the electrolyte foaming out through it immediately, usually with rust color mixed in with the white of the bubbling electrolyte (See later photos of cleaning the reserve tank). My set up had a vent line for evaporated fuel capture that I left open. You can see this vent line as the grey fuel line in the photos above of the bottom of the tank when the tank is being plugged etc. Foam bubbled out of this line while I cleaned both sides of the tank. If the charger runs for a few seconds on high amperage and then kicks out you have a shorting problem with the anode touching the cathode.:flame: Readjust the position of the anode and try again. The system should run at near the max amperage rating that your charger is rated for at the start of electrolysis.



The above picture of the start of electrolysis is not very good. But if you look at the face of the charger you will see two red LED light lit on the far right hand side of the charger face. These are the “Manual” setting light ‘on’ and the “12 amp” setting light ‘on’. If you are familiar with this type if charger you might also notice that the red amperage indicator on the ammeter is pointing down and to the right hand side of the dial in the red portion to the right side of the ammeter dial. This is the typical ammeter reading at the beginning of charging a fully discharged battery (12+ amps). Over time the ammeter reading will change (decrease), much as if it were charging up a battery.



In the better picture of the battery charger shown above, after working all night to remove rust from the LHS of the main tank you will note that the red LED’s on the RHS of the charger show only that the 12 amp setting is lit. The manual setting LED light is off because it is now flashing the “automatic” setting light to indicate that it has kicked off of the manual setting and that the manual high charge rate is at an end. This photo caught the “automatic” light when it was flashing “off”. The Ammeter shows its indicator pointing to some place between 0 and 2 amps. This is how the ammeter reacts to the anode being coated with rust particles, as the following photograph will show.






The rust build up was completely around the rebar. I have brushed off the rust on one side to show the difference before and after running the electrolysis for the LHS for one night. What has happened is that the electrolysis process has essentially “plated the anode with a layer of rust”. More rust is still in suspension in the electrolyte solution. The anode will have all the rust removed from it before it is reinstalled to clean the RHS of the main tank. Remember that with the anode coated with this layer of rust it had completely shut down the amperage going through the electrolysis process. The rust must be removed any time it restricts the flow of amperage through the electrolyte. Also notice that the rust adhering to the anode is very fine and it coats like a layer of paint. This is because the Magna tank, a California surface rusted tank, had no large chunks of rust to break off and float to the Anode where they might be captured as was seen in the photos of the Ottawa rust forum. I think you get the nuts and bolts of the process from what has already been described here. If you have a far gone mid west or northern tank with severe rust then using the electrolysis method will be useful in clearing the tank of every speck of rust prior to coating the inside of the tank. There is one difficulty with the method that might require acid washing after rust removal, but I’ll get into that later.

The RHS of the main tank will be described next, it gets a better result than the LHS. The cleaning of the reserve tank is also described later with pictures of the foaming that can be expected to occur. Finally I show a pile of precipitated rust that was collected by successively pouring off the clear electrolyte taken out of the tank after the electrolysis process was ended.



The electrolytic method works extremely well and it’s cheap. In fact, it is the main way museums remove rust from metallic objects they intend to display.

DKC

 

POR 15 makes an excellent rust removal kit and the final coating is an epoxy type so it wont ever come off and you wont have a rust problem ever again... in theory but for 30-40 bucks id say the price is right

 

Different strokes for different degrees of rust

"POR" and the other tank sealers use an "acid etcher" to make a clean roughed surface inside the tank by acid washing the inside tank surface in order for the epoxy sealer to attach/adhere better. Acid washing removes the top layer of steel inside the tank.

Electrolysis does not remove anything but the rust. It leaves the remaining steel inside the tank intact. In the case where a tank only has surface rust it will not disturb the integrity if the tank wall.

POR ("paint on rust") and the other acid washes are more suited to tanks that have pin holes due to complete rust through, where water has been sitting in the tank for years and in sufficient quantities to actually rot the tank through to the outer paint layers. The outer paint layers are all that is keeping the gasoline from seeping or dripping out of the tank. In these cases it is necessary to put an epoxy paint or straight epoxy layer inside the tank to act as a sort of bladder that will contain the gasoline from inside rather from the outside.

Even so, acid washing may not remove all the rust. There are places in the tank that can't be seen through the filler hole. These might have deep rust and be missed with aci washing the tank blind. There are places where the rust may be too deep into the tank steel to remove it in one attempt with the acid wash. Meanwhile, the bare steel is being eaten away by the acid that is allowed to sit on bare steel. Its a matter of a delicate balance with a very rusty tank. Do you want to get all the rust out at the expense of washing off good steel in the process and leaving paper thin walls to support the paint job on the outside of the tank?

With electrolysis these questions are moot. You are not going to loose any intact steel inside the tank, you are just going to remove the rust. And if you work electrolysis long enough you will remove of all of the rust and leave all the steel behind intact. But there is one problem with electrolysis. When you have finished with electrolysis there is a layer of "black iron" left on the surface of the inside of the tank. To get it off you need to brush it. This is an impossibility inside a Motorcycle gas tank. All you can do is wash it down with water, green or citrus cleaners. It might be removable with a very weak acid wash. It might be removable with one of the citris cleaners that are being sold now. Or you might just live with it and put gas in the tank and get some new gas filters to catch/stop it from getting into the carburetors.

Finally, remember that your cycle came with a plain steel tank. If you keep the gasoline free of water, and you keep condesation from introducing water into the tank, that steel tank should last a lifetime. If you live in a climate where there is a lot of moisture then you have your work cut out for you. If you live in an arid climate like Arizona or So Cal or other places in the south west of the US, you merely have to keep gas in the tank (preferably fill the tank) and drive the cycle to not have a rust problem.

 

Check this thread before buying tank coat product

Hey Turbocharged314159. Great deal on the vf500f. See you have a rusted tank. If you can't locate a replacement you might want to consider using electrolysis to clean the rust out. Good Luck
DKC