Quote:
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Originally Posted by Rick
Pineapple juice (unsweetened) .
Also .
Patience .  |
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