Here's a little update on the progress of this rebuild. It would be great if I could gradually update a thread like this, but that's not how I work. Brace yourself for an information dump!
It's mostly a scrapbook of pictures I've taken along the way with some annotations through in for context. For those of you with "the eye", I'll apologize ahead of time for the quality of the pictures. My Kyocera Brigadier is awesome for it's waterproofness and durability but the camera absolutely sucks compared to my previous Galaxy S2.
First, everything was de-rusted using citric acid. It worked great, the only thing is that I kept needing bigger and bigger containers to work in!
Starting off in the laundry tub, the idea of the hose being that I can run hot water through it and heat up the solution without diluting it. It worked a little, but not as much as I had hoped. The solution had a pH of about 3-5 throughout the few days of derusting. Certainly not an exact science, but it didn't need to be to do the job.
The fence was long and skinny.... I didn't want to make up this much solution, but it was the only practical way to proceed. I had other ideas but they all seemed to add a lot of time and difficulty or expense. This one is more dilute than the rest but still worked well in 2-3 days of soaking.
Some "before" pictures of the various castings...
And now for the best! The AFTER pictures! After the acid bath, these were neutralized with baking soda and thoroughly rinsed. They were then heated gently on my wood stove (which conveniently we've just started running intermittently), and then lightly oiled. The oil may give a false shine to the parts but the rust is most definitely GONE.
There are a few pitted areas, but we'll just call that "character" and carry on.
