Typically that crusty red devil known as rust is the arch nemesis of our dear friend steel. If you want to learn more about rust check out the wiki. More often than not though we are trying to keep rust away from our steel products. However sometimes rust looks pretty cool.
There are a lot of home brew ways of rusting steel and my particular method wasn’t anything new. I had already made some critical mistakes with this batch of parts. (Lot’s of experimentation around here) So I decided to try something while I was at it. I decided to rust these pieces to smithereens.
A few photos.
Rust – Prevention
If its a finished part with a pretty coating you probably don’t want to see rust – anywhere. The secret here is that the surface steel must essentially never get wet. That is hard to do considering that moisture is present in the air we breath. Think about rusted out vehicles for instance. They don’t have the holes where they do because water got underneath the paint from the outside.
Water gets trapped into a crevice or nook on the inside. It sits and stews for years until the fateful day when a pinhole forms. From there moisture starts working on both the inside and the outside. It starts with the orange dot. Then an orange dot grows and a bleed line begins to form.
Suddenly you’ve got two rusted lions fighting over food on top of your fender wheel.
Rust – Promotion
The funny thing about rust is it seems to permeate quickly when you don’t want it to. However, if you are waiting on hot rolled steel to rust grab yourself a cup of tea and take a seat. Depending on the circumstances and the steel used you might be waiting for 3 – 5 years for a nice surface rust to form over all your steel.
Perfect Example
In the photograph below we have a comparable amount of rust between the steel cutout and the diamond plate of my truck bed. The truck bed has been in the elements for nearly two years – exposed raw steel. It still isn’t completely covered. (It won’t be rusty forever – but that will come later) The decorative panel pictured was rusted in 3 days via a chemical bath. We can either leave it like this as sort of a consumable finish, or we can apply some sealant to lock it in time.
Here again is the same panel as pictured above in better light. Look how deep this rust color is compared to 2 years of organic aging. Quite the difference!
