Great experiment.

I didn't know hunters used molasses, how do they normally use it?

deer bait..molasses, apples anything to get them to ome to the area regularly, then when hunting season comes..just meet up with the deer looking for sweets and BAM. roast venison for dinner

Very interesting, following.

If you make the tube a few inches taller than a single leg and use 4” pvc all 4 legs fit in at once and takes way less fluid to submerge all of them.

Interesting. Did not know about this at all.
Lots of stuff in the internet.
Here is a nice review:

https://medium.com/project-lab/molasses-rust-removals-dark-secret-f6811cc218c1

Looking forward to see the results on the legs.
They are let rusted than the parts from the video above.
Thinking the results will be pretty good.

I'm not a hunter, but have lived all over the US and have many hunter friends. I grew up in Northern California and Oregon. Hunting was a skill out there. I also lived in Mississippi 15 years. It's all all about tree stands and bait in the south.

BTW, interesting rust removing techhnique.

Baiting is illegal, at least where I live.

Following

Thx for all the pics. Looks like a fine line regarding how long to soak.

The rust was under the chrome already, I think the same thing would have happened with evaporust.

Amazing transformation though. I'd take those legs with a small patch of missing chrome over the rusty mess they started out as. The bad one can go on the back.

Nice job. Your molasses mix will last a long time. Keep adding water.

Flies and bugs will get trapped in it; it is organic. It can get rank.

If rust gets under the chrome then the chrome is gone. No fault of the molasses.

You cannot over soak. But the rust build up at the bottom is difficult to remove completely.

I have 2 legs soaking now while I am away from home for 2 weeks.

For chrome legs, I spray gray primer and then a shot of silver. On the outside hit them with a coat or two of clear.

Once mounted, especially the back legs, they will look pretty good.

You almost have a life time supply of molasses. Your waste is molasses, iron oxide, and water. No MSDS is needed.

I bought a gallon of Evaporust and then discovered the molasses trick. It is easy and cheap and works. My Evaporust is sitting around...somewhere.

Last fall, I tripped over my cheap Walmart 10 galloncontainer which shattered and I lost all my mix.

I just scored an old Coleman cooler and will load it up with new mix when winter is gone.

Short answer: I use molasses only, although I tried electrolysis and liked that. But molasses is easier.

Amazing!

Following.

Just to continue with the molasses experiment. Since it works so well on rust, I decided to see if it would work on corroded MPUs. Well, the short answer is molasses does not do anything to corrosion due to leaking batteries.

Attached are the before and after pics of a section of the MPU after soaking in a 1 part molasses to five parts water for five days. Pic with the switches in the picture is the before.

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I believe you need a strong acid to clean the alkaline corrosion, and a cursory internet search shows molasses is just one above neutral.
I'd be curious to see what ph value Evaporust has, must be something more of the chemical makeup and not the ph value that creates such drastic results in either case!

My travels are over. This morning I pulled one of the legs I had soaking to see how it was looking.

Somehow, I managed to delete my "before" pics. What I have left is sort of half-n-half. These are 31" legs and my PVC pipe soaker was only designed for 28" legs so the top part did not get soaked. So you can make a comparison between top and bottom.

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These legs are bad with lots of rust. The rust is deep and much chrome has been lost.

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I am going to soak these a little longer. I may have to resort to a rotary wire brush to attack the area down at the leg leveler. And to satisfy my curiosity and the curiosity of others, before I resort to the wire brush I will soak this leg in my Evaporust and try to come up with some sort of comparison.

As you can see, the chrome is blown on this leg but these are 31" legs I will be using to jack up the back of my pins for steeper pitch. I will hit them with some silver paint and no one will ever notice how roached they are. I only gave $2.50 each for 4 of them and used about 20 cents worth of molasses for all 4.

If you want to clean corrosion from circuit boards you want to use toilet bowl cleaner. There is an entire thread on using toilet bowl cleaner for PCBs.

That's what I use on my chrome wheels on my truck.

Cottonm4
I agree the acidic toilet bowl cleaner works best, and that’s what I use to clean corroded MPUs. I just wanted to try this simply out of curiosity, without doing any investigating to see if it had been tried before or if it could even work.

My curiosity has been satisfied, and my results had been codified.

thanks for sharing, will be trying this out for sure

Isn't the waste going to be molasses, solid iron (Fe) and water? The hydroxamic acid in the molasses will reduce the iron oxide (rust) to a solid iron with no rust. The hydroxamic acid has changed from hydroxamic acid to whatever hydroxamic acid plus oxygens is. I don't think that this solution will be good forever unless I am missing something because the hydroxamic that has pulled the two oxygens from the rust isnt goung to be able to remove anymore oxygen so it is useless. Only a small amout in the molasses will be neutralized during each treatment. Eventually all of hydroxamic acid will be useless for rust. I'm not sure how many legs That will do but probably quite a few with diminishing returns.

I cannot answer your question. Much to my regret, I never studied chemistry. Hell, at this late stage in my life, I have toyed with the idea of getting one of those chemistry kits so I could learn the art/science of chemistry.

I'm guessing you are correct that a point will be reached that the mix will no longer work. I just have not reached that point yet.

The molasses you can buy at Tractor Supply costs $8.00 per gallon or .06¢ per ounce. So, to load up a 4" PVC tube with new mix only costs around .20¢ worth of molasses and the time it takes to place the legs in the PVC tube takes about 30 seconds. If after giving the legs a soak and it looks like the mix has gone dead, and since it only takes about 5 minutes to toss the old mix and make some new, I have not really thought about the diminishing returns all that much.

I did an experiment with one leg to really see what goes on.

This is one of the legs I had soaking in molasses water for a couple of weeks. It came out much improved from what it was.

Sorry, I lost the before pics.

It still shows sign of rust. Deep, into the chrome deep rust.

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The top part where the bolt holes are did not get soaked as my PVC pipe was too short. You can see a little bit of before and after. Since these will be painted silver and shoved to the back of the cab I could sand on these a bit and make them work.

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The problem is down low by the leveler. The rust here is very heavy and I wanted something better.

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So, I brought out the big guns. I went for a concentrated soak. 100% Evapo-rust. No dilution. This is a 5 day soak.

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The short answer is that Evapo-rust is kicking ass.

For me, I have good luck with molasses on the lighter rust. And the cost cannot be beat.

I have tried my Evapo-rust using the method of flooding a paper towel and letting that soak on the the part and did not have good luck. But if I can soak something in a gallon of Evapo-rust I may start doing that. Evapo-rust is not exactly cheap. But it sure did a good job.

I think I will try the electrolysis method on another leg and see how that goes.