Here they are before restoration:
When starting to restore seriously rusty items, one of my favourite tools is this air-driven needle-scaler. It has 30 or so needles which vibrate vigorously like a pneumatic drill, and "chip" loose rust off. Here is the tool and one of the wheels - I have just made a start on this wheel, but a long way to go!
Using the needle scaler took quite a long time, but worked well, here is the top and bottom of the wheel after "needle scaling":
Next I cleaned it up some more with various wire brushes etc. on both drills and angle-grinders, and removed the rest of the surface rust and paint.
I ordered a number of interesting rust-related products from Bilt-Hamber, as I have heard a lot of good reports, and wanted to try them out. One of these is the Deox-C crystals, that you dissolve in water to form a de-rusting bath solution. I bought a large flexible bucket for £10 from B&Q, made up the solution in a 25litre drum, and poured it into the bucket. Here is the wheel just after I put it in the bath:
This stayed in the bath for two days, then today I took it out, rinsed it off, dried it and went over it again with a nylon cup-brush in a drill to brighten the steel up - here is the result:
I then painted this with etch primer, but unfortunately when it was hanging up being painted, it fell on the floor and dented the rim. I think I will be able to bash the dent out, so I will do this when it is dry and re-paint it in primer - photos to follow!
I then made a start on the next wheel. This time I've decided to let the Deox-C bath do more of the work, so here is the back of the wheel after needle-scaling, although this time I only went over it quickly to get the worst off - as you can see it's still very rusty, we'll see how the bath copes with that!
In order for the bath to do its job, all the paint has to be off the wheel first of course. This time I decided to try Nitromors paint stripper. I spent several hours this afternoon working with this horrible sludgy stuff, and the photo shows how far I got after rinsing it off the wheel - not a very good result! I'm going to give up on the paint stripper and go back to taking the maint off mechanically - I'm sure it will be more thorough and quicker in the long run.
Still a long way to go - more to come!
Good work and some good tips too, Thanks
Still, I get the general idea - as I say, I might give that a try in the future, may even do it quite soon if the Deox-C doesn't work, especially as it sounds a lot cheaper!