#hutofhandcraft #arborpress #restoration #diy

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In this video I restored and old arbor press.

You will see a lot of lathe turning, sanding, sandblasting, etching, filing and more in this video!

I wanted to have an arbor press for a very long time and was searching for one since I started YouTube. I bought this arbor press from a privat guy on the internet. He told me that it belonged to his father and was in a wet shed for a lot of years. The gear and handle were stored apart from the rest, he had to search for it to be able to send it to me. That is probably also why the part which prevents the gear from coming out was missing. That is also why the condition of those parts is much worse.

Several parts were missing. The bolts to adjust the play, the part which prevents the gear to come out, the ends of the handle, the name plate…

About the gear:
This kind of arbor press is produced to this day and according to my research the gear and handle of the newer ones get chrome plated. The plating on my gear was also very thick, which is typical for a hard chrome layer which is applied directly on the steal, other than gloss chrome plating, which is only a thin layer plated on a thin layer of nickel.
Even though it was looking very dull and not shiny like chrome usually looks I thought that it was just the age and of course my sandblasting, which matted the plating. I ordered a Chromestripper and failed. The Chromestripper should turn yellow when it removes the chrome, but it didn’t.
Because the plating wasn’t getting removed with sandblasting and on some spots it was already removed, I had to think about another way to remove it. For that I first thought about what kind of plating it could be: nickel or zinc. Zinc would be untypical, but I wanted to be sure. Zinc gets deep black with my cold bluing liquid just as steal. I used my cold bluing liquid on the part to see how it would react. As you have seen in the video it became a little grey black bluish (definetly notv zinc) just like the 99,9% nickel part that I also applied cold bluing on. So I was sure that it must be nickel. By the way: My cold bluing liquid contains nitric acid and nickel is soluble in diluted nitric acid.
Because I didn’t want to buy a nickel stripper I just used the method you would normaly nickel plate with. I made a 10% acetic acid solution (formula c1 * V1 = c2 * V2) and added table salt for better conductivity. Because this is no water with table salt electrolysis now chlorine is produced in the process! (Never make a water table salt electrolysis!) The acetic acid in vinegar dissociates to acetate ions and oxonium ions. Since acetic acid is a very bad electrolyte we need something better so the electrons can move and the reaction can take place: NaCl
The chemical equation goes like this:
3 NaCl + CH3COOH → HCl +Na+ +CH3COO- (or NaCH3COO - sodium acetate). As you can see chlorine ions react with hydrogen ions and produce HCl and not chlorine. Btw: the balance of the chemical reaction is more on the left side, so there is not much HCl in the solution.
Instead of a pure nickel part I used the gear which was nickel plated and instead of a part that would get nickel plated I used a graphite anode. After about 2 hours (! The plating was very thick) and about 9V the nickel plating was nearly completely removed. For the rest I was able to just sandblast it away.

I hope you will have some fun watching the video! If you have any further questions on the process, tools, material or else write a comment, I will try my best to answer your questions.



Disclaimer:
The experiments are only for educational purposes and serve as entertainment.
I am experienced in handling the used substances and I advise everyone who is not a trained professional not to imitate the experiments I show you.
For experiments which could cause potential danger I will not tell you which chemicals I am using to prevent imitating. Those who know what is happening, know the chemicals anyway and probably are trained professionals. :)
I am not responsible for personal injury or property damage if the experiments will be imitated.
I hope you understand.

Arbor press restoration I Dr. Hut of Handcraft