Soda Please

Well, It rained most of the week-end, so any chance of powder coating and painting parts went out the window.

I am waiting for some small 1" buffing wheels to come in the post so I could not do much buffing. I spent the first part of the week-end washing, cleaning and buffing some smaller parts.

My son and I have been discussing the merits of doing some soda blasting on some of the parts. We made a trip to Harbor Freight tools, and looked at the soda blaster gear. But we did not want to dump $100.00 on a soda blaster and buy 50 lbs of baking soda if it did not do what we wanted to do. So we took the cheap R & D approach.

They had an air blaster kit, used for glass etching and small parts blasting. It had a small nozzle which we need for soda blasting. We then went to the local Costco (large quantity food store) and picked up 13 lbs of baking soda for around $5.00.

I decided that since it was raining I would strip the brake calipers down clean then up, polish up the bolts and possibly media blast them for powder coating.

The more I worked on the calipers the more I did not want to media blast them and powder coat them, but they had dirt embedded in the powder coat finish and some one had painted the Brembo logo red and it just looked crappy.

We did some testing with out make shift soda blaster and found out some really cool things. The soda blaster would remove paint without messing with the smoothness of the finish but would not remove powder coat. The soda blaster works great on removing carbon from pistons.

So we decided to give the soda blasting a try on the brake calipers.

Here are some pictures of our findings:

Here is yours truly doing some soda blasting:



Another shot of the back side of a caliper.



We found that the soda works great at cleaning up powder coated parts.

Here is a shot of a dirty caliper as I first started blasting:



Here is a shot of the caliper as I progressed, Notice that the soda blasting removed the cruddy red paint and cleaned up the gold powder coat.



Here is a shot of the finished calipers before I put them back together:



Here is a final shot of the calipers put back together, calipers washed and polished bolts:



Next week if it does not rain we will hopefully do some painting and powder coating.

Thanks

Joe