So I had these bolts and eccentric washers that I took off my car and replaced and really I didn’t even need to. The old ones were coated in surface rust so I decided to try some stuff to take it off.
I had read a few raving reviews about Evapo-Rust and seen some videos so I decided to give it a shot. The stuff looks like anti-freeze but it feels slippery like dish-soap on your fingers. It’s pretty expensive too this bottle cost just under $9 and it was barely enough to do the hardware I was cleaning. Though it’s supposedly reusable so I dumped it back in the bottle once I was done.
Here’s a picture of my hardware beforeI did anything.
Notice there is both surface rust as wella as this thick black stuff. That thick black stuff is rubberized undercoating because the previous owner of the car had it coated to prevent rusting and it got on some of the bolts. It looks really nasty but it doesn’t harm anything. Apparently Evapo-Rust doesn’t harm plastic or rubber so I went into this assuming that it would leave theundercoating stuff (which kind of sucks becaus it looks ugly).
I dumped the whole bottle of of the stuff in the bottom of a cut-up water jug and just dumped all my hardware in there. Supposidly it does it’s work in a matter of minutes but I was on my way out so i just left it for the night.
The next morning after rincing off the hardware it looked like this:
Some patches of rust still remained but it was mostly cosmetic as the parts were all smooth to the touch. As suspected the undercoated parts were still narly. I decided to try a 2nd application to see if it could get rid of the rest of the crap to make them completely clean.
I’m pretty happy with the outcome, if I want to remove the undercoated parts I’ll have to use paint stripper or a wire brush but on a whole the Evapo-Rust did it’s job. $9 might be a bit much but considering that all of this hardware NEW from Nissan cost nearly $100 to replace, I’m fairly certain that next time I take off some bolts I’ll clean them with this stuff before deciding to replace them. At least now the parts are clean enough that I’ll be able more easily sell them and recoup some of the money I spent on the new parts.
