Battery Tender Junior for electrolysis rust removal?

[marshall]

I've got a Deltran Battery Tender Junior, not sure if it's the 12V/.75A or 6V/.75A version. I'd like to clean some parts up using the electrolysis trick. Anyone tried this? I don't care if it takes a long time, but I'm wondering whether .75A is just too weak or if the charger's microprocessor won't let it work. I know it's not supposed to start charging unless it senses a battery voltage, but maybe I could "jump-start" it using my motorcycle battery?

Marshall

[gareth]

I took the rust off an fj1100 4-pipe header using electrolysis. I had a big 40gallon basin, a handful of Sodium Carbonate, and did some experiments with 12v power supplies to see what I needed. The automatic battery charger that I used just didn't do anything... I put a car battery in parallel with it, to see what happened, and I just ended up trashing the battery. Then I picked up a serious 10amp, 12v stand-alone power supply. This seemed to do the trick, but got very hot. So I pointed a fan at it for a couple of days.. With the dedicated power supply, I could see the reaction happening, nice bubbling off the header as the magic happened. Mind you, the other electrode was an old iron snow-shovel wired in. It looked really funky, invited a lot of "crazy redneck science" comments, but it worked really well...
It was a big item though with a lot of rust on it. I think with a smaller item you could definitely use a much smaller DC supply...but I think any kind of battery tender or automatic charger with shut-off is not going to work. Some of the older style chargers might..

HTH.

[DGXSER]

I used my Battery Companion battery tender type trickle charger to clean my gas tank with electrolysis. It is a 1.5 amp with a light for charging, charged, and check battery. Every ow and then it woudl go to the check battery setting and I would unplug it move stuff around a bit and replug it and it would work. The coat hangers came out looking like they were sitting in a clost on the Titanic since it sank! Worked so well I had to line the tank thanks to the pin holes that got opened up.

[clcorbin]

I just finished the tank on my 79F. I used an old PC power supply that I had converted to general power supply use. It was rated at 12A on the 12V rail.

I only did the inside of my tank (sealed tank and filled it up with electrolyte), so I had less than half the surface area a full tank would have had (sort of...). When I first hooked up the power supply, the 12V rail was pulled down to just over 11V. I wasn't too worried about the supply as it was sitting in the shop which was about 25F at the time and it was fan cooled. With those temps, it should have been able to provide 20A on the 12V line without too much problems. For all I know, it did.

After a couple of hours, the voltage came back up to around 12.6V and slow rose higher as the process continued until it was back at 12V when I finished it up the next day.