Rusting & Pitting Steel How To?

Having ammonium nitrate on or near the steel piece (cleaned of all grease) should help.

I remember this guy dissolving copper in muriatic acid (HCl) and then diluting 20:1 with water, see here

I think that there are many recipes. I have no interest in using powerful chemicals, so peroxide, vinegar, and salt sounds good to me.

Your artist friend might want to look into the artmetal.com group, lots of good metal information there. I have hung out on their listsever for years.

Richard

cheryl179 wrote:

Almost as many ways to make it rust as there are ways to prevent rust!!

I just did an ornamental rust job on a 4x8 ft steel sign a couple of weeks ago. Cleaned metal, gave it two spritzer coats of the following at 24 hr intervals. Got a nice mottled surface rust, but no pitting.

Bill

Solutions probably won't pit low-carbon stuff that much, high-carbon alloys will really pit if left in salt or other corrosives awhile. Some experimentation required. Maybe rock salt left on the surface would do the pitting if kept damp. Cat pee rusts stuff up pretty well, hydrochloric or nitric acid fumes ditto. Might be a combination of coarse sand-blasting followed by a rust treatment would work to give that WWI relic look.

Stan

If it is not too large, pack it in concentrated granular fertilizer, such as Miracle Gro, slightly dampened.

This has the grand advantage that you can easily (and usefully) dispose of the chemistry once you're done with it.

If you can check out SAMS for the volume amounts of Vinegar, salt and Baking Soda (to kill the acid)(then wash). I bought HCL from the lumber yard - in the plumbing section.

Martin

Martin H. Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member

Richard Fergus>

Fertilizer does a great job of rusting and pitting things. Unfortuantly, I didn't want the things rusted and pitted the first time I learned this.

Wes S

remove any passivation or protection from the surface before applying the rusting agent.

Wear gloves and eye protection.

Wash with soap, rinse.

Spritz on muriatic acid until surface is saturated. Keep wet for 15 minutes. Rinse with water. Allow to dry. Spritz on household bleach until all of surface is saturated. Allow to dry. Rust will be instantaneous.

More cycles of wetting with bleach, then allowing to dry will cause more rust.

For pitting, apply ice cream salt to wet bleach, spritz with bleach as needed to keep wet.

The rust on this six bottle winerack took about two hours to produce on a sunny spring day in Texas.