If you are going to reuse the stuff after this job, make sure you strain it through some fine cloth to get all the iron residue out of the liquid. If you don't, it keeps working on the iron in suspension and wears out the fluid much faster.

Remember: It should be a pleasantly light yellow, well-hydrated urine color. The darker it gets, the worse condition the liquid (and your kidneys ) are. :scholar:

This has been a public service announcement from you medic/mechanic.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. The whole plan with the 5 gallons is to drop multiple parts in to de-rust. There's only 1 door hinge in there now. I'll put 4 muffler hangers in from my Camaro soon too. I'll strain it after all those have been cleaned. Can't see doing that after every small part..:dunno:

I have paint strainers, that should be fine enough, eh ? Now I need to clean out 1 of my other pails for this.
The heater works, but was set too low, so I turned it up to 88°. Several hours later, the liquid is pleasantly warm, but so is the whole dang pail. I'm loosing a lot of heat that way, soooo I found some thick shipping packaging and wrapped it for now, but I'll look for something better to retain the heat. I'll probably make a beanie cap for the lid too, as that is quite warm from heat loss. This is starting to get more involved than what I was looking for. Hope the circulating pump speeds up the process and gets part clean quickly.

I just use an old T-shirt doubled-over with a magnet in it and push it into a large funnel.

For the 1 gal size a mesh coffee filter inside of a funnel works great also. I need to label it for shop use only lol ...

:smirk:

That pot of coffee on an used filter a little strong...:grin: