Is Evapo Rust safe for cleaning keris?
 

Evapo Rust sounds interesting because it's water based, it's supposed to be safe even for paint and rubber. I was told by the Indonesian importer that you can dump the whole engine piston with paint, rubber, and all into the solution, and all Evapo Rust does is remove Fe2O3 (rust) because it reacts with nothing else.

Wouldn't this be a good and thorough way to clean up the smallest rust particles? Any opinion why it might be not good for kerises?

It will strip down to bare metal, and in my experience, yes it does etch further.

Pineapple juice (unsweetened) .

Also .

Patience . :)

I second that.

Is it necessary to do something to strip off any oil on the blade before using pineapple juice? Also, what would be the best method of applying it? Immersion? I found some rust starting to form on my keris today. :(

It would indeed be a good idea to give a keris a good wash in warm soapy water to help remove dirt and oil before the pineapple juice. The blade should be totally immersed and frequently (couple of times a day perhaps) brushed with a toothbrush.
But consider this...this is also going to remove whatever current stain the blade holds. If you are not prepared to re-stain with arsenic/warangan then you might not want to go so far. If you only have some minor rust you might be able to remove it with some WD-40 and some gentle brushing. For the more complete job though you can find some basic instructions in this old thread:
http://www.vikingsword.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000717.html

Thanks for the information. Not sure I'm up to the task of re-staining my blade myself, so I'll probably try the WD-40 first. It was just a little rust...

Patience is a mother virtue but the results are not always guaranteed...

I would like to report my personal experience as follows:
I recently purchased an old kris panjang with a partly rusty and corroded blade (see top pictures). The rust was unevenly ditributed along the blade and in the form of a hard black crust.
I decided to test the pineapple juice method for cleaning it (100% unsweetened juice from Costa-Rica). As the blade is 60 cm long I used a vertical container (PVC pipe with a bottom plug).
During the first 2 days, the cleaning results were encouraging and about 50% of the rust was removed after regular scrubbing with a kitchen iron pad impregnated with a cleaning paste. However from the 3rd day, the progress became insignificant and absolutely nil after about 5 days so I decided to stop the procedure and replace the pineapple juice by undiluted white vinegar (8% vol). After few hours the results were already visible and after about 24 hours and few scrubbing procedures virtually all the remaining rust spots had disappeared and the overall cleaning result is satisfactory (see bottom pictures).
As a conclusion, vinegar appeared much more efficient than pineapple juice for cleaning this particular blade and I tentatively explain it as follows:
1. The pineapple juice did not ferment at all during the whole period may be because the contact with air in the vertical container was minimal, so the juice was not enough acidic for removing the rust. Of course the juice pulp settled at the bottom of the container but there was no major difference of cleaning efficiency along the blade.
2. Contrary to most kris blades, this particular one has no pamor and is made from solid steel so it may be more difficult to clean it than blades made from mixed metals.

Next time I will try citric acid (diluted at 10% in water) which is a recognized rust removing agent and which gave very good results on another Sumatra blade without pamor.
Regards

Sulphuric acid is even more effective if speed is the criterion. Sulphuric acid will clean a blade in minutes. Aqua regia is even faster.

I used to use pure Queensland Pineapple juice.

On a heavily rusted blade rust removal could take two weeks, but most of the rust was usually removed in the first couple of days. After that each time it was removed from the juice it was necessary to work over the blade with steel picks of various sizes from a bearing scraper to a saddler's needle and pick off the hard rust before putting it back into the juice.

Then the Australia company "Golden Circle" was bought by an American firm.

They stopped selling pure Queensland pineapple juice and started to import pineapple juice concentrate from South America. The stuff tastes like sh***, you'd need to be dying of thirst to drink it, and even then you'd probably think twice before letting it pass your lips. As for its use as a keris cleaner, well, it works for maybe two days, then it goes dead.

I no longer use pineapple juice to clean blades, for the simple reason that I can no longer buy it. Even though Australia produces so many pineapples they sometimes get plowed back into the ground we have a profit driven international company importing pure concentrate of horse pi** from South America and trying to sell it to us as Pineapple juice. Be a cold day in hell before I buy another can of this garbage. You can't drink it, and its useless for cleaning purposes.

Another international company did a similar thing with Arnotts Biscuits, who when they were a locally owned company used to produce what were arguable the world's finest mass produced biscuits. It took these business geniuses maybe 20 years, but they have finally got that biscuit company to the position where its share of super market shelf space has shrunk to the point where you almost can't see the brand any more. The quality of Arnotts Biscuits dropped to the point where nobody except those without taste buds buy them.

Anyway, we don't use chocolate biscuits to de-rust keris, so it probably doesn't matter much.

These days I use ordinary household vinegar for de-rusting, and next time I have some blades to do I intend to try citric acid.

yeah, faster ... come back after one hour, and your blade will be completely dissolved in the solution ...

I mean really dissolved without a trace but perhaps a thick yellowish smoke ... as that thing (aqua regia - or king of water) can literally eat away ceramic blocks, dissolve gold and platinum and must be handled with extreme care ...

I myself using lime (jeruk nipis) and coconut water, and some soft steel wire brush

Regarding acid... this is one of my favorite threads:
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...ght=holy+smoke.

It really begins with post #29, and from post #36 on for some posts it becomes otherworldly good.

Enjoy! :D

how scary ( I meant barbaric), to see someone destroyed a keris like that ...

I've seen junk cleaned and turned to be treasure, but this one ... just broke my heart to see it

hi neo ...
where in Indonesia can you buy evapo rust ?
I'd like to give it a shot - for my motorcycle spare parts, not keris :P

You can buy it on line Donny, but i don't know about the shipping costs...

that's exactly the problem ... 1 gallon is only 25 usd ... but the shipping cost is 78 usd to Indonesia T_T

Coca Cola then ??

For the bike parts ..... ;)

coca cola is same as acid, it corroded the metal

I have read that evapo rust is basically chelates compound, which bonds with Ferric compounds ... it operates in pH 6,2 - 7.1 (pretty safe), and safe to be dumped to sewer

no need gloves / glasses / etc when using it, as it is safe

it is formulated so that it is strong enough to bond with rust (Fe2O3) on the surface of the corroded parts, but not strong enough to pull Fe molecules out from the blade. Basically it converts and dissolving ONLY the rust and leave the other parts

but that's the marketing talk ... I need proof :D
that's why I wanted to try some

Interesting re the Golden Circle. Approx 2-3 years ago the stuff was great for rust removal and tasted really good (especially with sprite zero). Had problems with the kids getting into my stash. But the last couple of lots I bought, maybe a year ago, was thin and not the nicest, thought I'd got some from a bad batch. Think I've still got some around somewhere.

Yeah, this is what happens when you are bound by law to try to produce the biggest possible profit for your shareholders. This takeover by foreign companies of Australian --- and I guess businesses in other countries --- usually seems to go in more or less the same way:- they take a good company with a good product and set out to totally destroy both the product and the company. Seems like insanity to me. But what would I know?

Jean, I suppose that your Panjang keris is that of which you spoke to me last Thursday in Milano. Really a very nice piece, and my compliments for the restoration.

Hello Gio,
Thank you. This is my eldest panjang kris blade, I did not really restore it but just cleaned it in pure vinegar (8-10 % acetic acid) for about 24 hours with 2 intermediate scrubbings; there are some small pits left but they were present before cleaning.
I attach the pics of another panjang blade before and after cleaning it in vinegar, with the same procedure and a very good result also.
By the way and contrary to diluted mineral acids (hydrochoric, sulphuric, nitric, etc), vinegar is a too weak acid for attacking the bare metal in case anybody has doubts about it. :)
Regards

Nice job Jean. I might give vinegar a try next time i do a cleaning. I noted that Alan stated he has switched to vinegar since they stopped having good pineapple juice in Australia for the purpose.