Aghios Nikolaos 29th April
There's an old saying in the Royal Navy, 'if it moves salute it; if it doesn't paint it.' It's a constant battle onboard to stop things from corroding. Painting is one way. Prevention with a regular spray of WD40 is another. But what do you do when your anchor chain gets rusty and starts messing up your deck like this?
The answer has been a bit of a running saga this winter. Leighton spent some time browsing metalshop chat rooms on the Internet, populated as far as I could see by good ole boys and characters that looked like Z.Z. Top. He found out how to get rid of rust by soaking the offending bits in molasses. 'Oh yeah?' I hear you say. 'How's that ever going to work?' It was the same reaction from cruisers here too. Leighton insisted the molasses chelates the rust out of the chain and leaves it clean, so he wanted to try it out.
As it happened we'd also got hold of some free samples of a non-toxic liquid called Metal Rescue that apparently does the same trick, but quicker. So we decided to do a bit of an experiment and compare the two.
To a great deal of scepticism on the pontoon, we filled an olive pickling barrel with 10:1 water and molasses and put all the chain we could fit into it - about 45 metres. Chelating isn't an overnight process, so we sat back and left it to brew for one month. The smell of fermenting sugar which filtered out through the lid led us to believe that maybe something was happening inside.
We treated the rest of the chain in a bucket of Metal Rescue. This only takes 24 hours to work, so we left it to soak in the brew a short length at a time.
And the result? To no-one's great surprise the opening of the olive barrel was a bit of an anticlimax. We still have a rusty anchor chain. Not as bad as before, but it still has quite a bit of rust on it in places. The Metal Rescue did a better job. It cleaned up small items really well, but the 5 litres we had couldn't cope with the amount of chain we had. It would probably work if you used enough of it, but it isn't cheap and the cost would go quite a long way to paying for a new chain.
We've not given up on it yet - other cruisers have told us their tricks for dealing with the problem that we can try, like dragging the chain along behind us over a sandy sea bed; turning it end to end; re-galvanising it. And if all else fails we can buy a new one!
There's an old saying in the Royal Navy, 'if it moves salute it; if it doesn't paint it.' It's a constant battle onboard to stop things from corroding. Painting is one way. Prevention with a regular spray of WD40 is another. But what do you do when your anchor chain gets rusty and starts messing up your deck like this?
The answer has been a bit of a running saga this winter. Leighton spent some time browsing metalshop chat rooms on the Internet, populated as far as I could see by good ole boys and characters that looked like Z.Z. Top. He found out how to get rid of rust by soaking the offending bits in molasses. 'Oh yeah?' I hear you say. 'How's that ever going to work?' It was the same reaction from cruisers here too. Leighton insisted the molasses chelates the rust out of the chain and leaves it clean, so he wanted to try it out.
As it happened we'd also got hold of some free samples of a non-toxic liquid called Metal Rescue that apparently does the same trick, but quicker. So we decided to do a bit of an experiment and compare the two.
To a great deal of scepticism on the pontoon, we filled an olive pickling barrel with 10:1 water and molasses and put all the chain we could fit into it - about 45 metres. Chelating isn't an overnight process, so we sat back and left it to brew for one month. The smell of fermenting sugar which filtered out through the lid led us to believe that maybe something was happening inside.
We treated the rest of the chain in a bucket of Metal Rescue. This only takes 24 hours to work, so we left it to soak in the brew a short length at a time.
And the result? To no-one's great surprise the opening of the olive barrel was a bit of an anticlimax. We still have a rusty anchor chain. Not as bad as before, but it still has quite a bit of rust on it in places. The Metal Rescue did a better job. It cleaned up small items really well, but the 5 litres we had couldn't cope with the amount of chain we had. It would probably work if you used enough of it, but it isn't cheap and the cost would go quite a long way to paying for a new chain.
We've not given up on it yet - other cruisers have told us their tricks for dealing with the problem that we can try, like dragging the chain along behind us over a sandy sea bed; turning it end to end; re-galvanising it. And if all else fails we can buy a new one!
2 comments:
The same happened to my boat a few years ago and and after trying all sorts of remedies including vinegar, I ended up buying new chain for pola lepta (or mucho dinero).
We were told it was from France, which has reputation for quality products, but what we weren't told was that it came to France from another country that doesn't have a very good reputation for products made of steel.
A year later the "new" chain looked exactly like the old one. So be careful!
I just saw an ingenious and very effective way of cleaning a rusty chain that only a couple of boys would think of.
Lay the chain on the ground. Take a hammer and pound the rust off each link. Keep going until all the rust is gone. Magic!
And if any of this blog's readers are in Aktio in the Ionian, Harry and James will do it for you for some pocket money.
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