TheMudbrooker's Guide to Cast Iron: Restoration

Hi Mug Runner, this is the second of my videos on

cast

iron

and in my first video I showed you how to identify it and gave you some tips on where you can find good, cheap

cast

iron

. I got lucky the other day. I stopped at the goodwill, found these two pans if you can see the price tag very well, but they wanted $8 for each of them, even better, the blue labels were half price so I paid $4 each for these and these are a fantastic example of how to buy the pan before you bother. Looking at the name because in both cases there is enough buildup on the back of them that I can't see any manufacturer's name, if there is one there there are some clues as to what they are not, nor does the pan have a ridge on the bottom . the handle that goes all the way to the side of the pan and no pan has a notched heat ring so I know it's not a BSR Birmingham stove and pan first and because it doesn't have a notched heat ring I know.

Neither of these are vintage Lodge beyond that, I don't really know who made them, but they are both nice light cast iron, very good quality, it's a nice, smooth, fine grained metal, no cracks, they passed the ring test, but it's a little dirty, but this one isn't really bad, but this one has some old, sticky, nasty oil on it and it has a buildup of dirt on the outside of the pan and on the bottom, now the dirt on the outside of the pan no. It doesn't really damage anything, it's not very aesthetically pleasing, but it doesn't interfere with the cooking properties of the pan, but a buildup of carbon on the bottom of the pan will eventually cause problems, it acts as insulation and the bottom of the pan. the frying pan will win.

It doesn't heat evenly and it will heat up much more slowly than it should so you have to remove all of that and in any case you have to reduce them to the metal, start over and reese's correctly because you never know who. I did what I did to this pan before I picked it up, so the two things you'll have to deal with on used antique iron pans is rust. You see, this pan is quite rusty and dirty. The first part of this video. I'm going to explain several different ways to remove grime from the pan and show you the way I used the most in part two.

I'm going to show you how to deal with rust and a couple of ways to deal with it. of which will remove rust and scab in one step now to remove the burnt and built up dirt on the pan you can use bleach mix a large plastic tub filled with a strong lying solution and throw the pans in there let it sit However long it takes, it takes two or three days and the bleach will dissolve all this gunk and leave you with bare metal. It's a pretty popular method, but the downside is that you'll end up with a big tub full of caustic chemical solution that you already have. to get rid of the other way and this is the way I usually do well first the second way to get rid of the gunk is if you have an electric oven with a self-cleaning cycle you can put your pan in the oven with something underneath to catch the burning gunk and put it on the clean cycle, the downside is that this is what will end up kind of burning off the grime, but you'll end up with a pretty rusty pan that needs To be more boring, what I usually use is oven cleaner.

Now some people are opposed to oven cleaner, they are afraid that it will get into the pores of the iron and you will never get it out and you will have oven cleaner on your pans, the truth is that oven cleaner is probably 95% bleach and cast iron, well, it's porous, it's not a sponge, it's not going to absorb anything to a really significant degree and the oven cleaner will wash off, so if you're going to use an oven cleaner or live, or any cleaning technique, so Generally, the first thing I do is try to scrape off as much loose dirt as possible.

I use a putty knife, you don't want to use something that's too stiff or too hard because I don't want to tear the metal underneath, but just go around, scrape a little and use Planescape to remove what you can. I'm going to do this outside so I don't make too big a mess in my kitchen at that time. They removed some of the dirt. I'll come back and show you the next step. Okay, I'm back. A pan like this that doesn't have a lot of buildup, it's really not worth trying to scrape like this. Thin things like this don't scrape off very easily anyway, so it's kind of a waste of time, this will just go straight into the oven cleaner.

This pan, I spent eight ten minutes scraping it and it revealed a couple of things first underneath that. The crust is quite rusty, which is not unusual for pans that have a lot of dirt buildup because moisture will seep in behind that dirt and rust the iron underneath. Secondly, it also revealed who made this pan, but I'm not going to show you. I'll still save that for a little tease later in this pan. I'll probably have to do something to deal with the rust beyond oven cleaner, neither lying nor oven cleaner will remove the rust, they're great. to remove the dirt, but the underlying rust won't have any effect, so I have to move the settings on my camera and we'll run them with the oven cleaner.

I'm here at my poor old sink with rust stains and I'm going to use some oven cleaner on this pan to do that, of course you'll need a pair of rubber oven cleaning gloves, whether brand name or store bought. It really doesn't make much difference, this was on sale cheap so I got this, but a good heavy duty oven cleaner works better. You'll also need a stainless steel scouring pad, one that's almost worn out, but a scraper of some kind like the spatula I've been using will do for this. It works quite a bit, it's quite useful and so is a small wire brush.

This brass stainless steel also works well. It's good for getting into nooks and crannies and around letters. If it has letters, you will also need a large enough plastic bag. To put your pan in small saucepans, a large ziplock bag works great, but for this I'll need something like a tall kitchen trash bag. Other than that, all we have to do is spray it well all over with the oven cleaner that you will use. You won't get much fumes, but don't use it with a hot iron. If the pan is hot, you're going to get a lot more fumes and you're going to choke them, they're going to gasp and cough or a little bit, you don't want to do that, but spray it well and coat all the surfaces of your pan.

Walker and be careful. I want to show you the name on the pan, so get it, um, but just work all the way around and cover everything completely once. It's all covered, grab your plastic bag and then go. The purpose of the bag is to prevent all of the oven cleaner from drying normally at this point. Normally at this point you would let it sit overnight, but it's pretty early in the day, so. We'll let it sit for four or five hours, maybe six, then I'll wipe it down and see where we're at and if it needs another application we'll put a little bit more in there and let it sit overnight, sometimes it takes three, four, five turns to get this to where you want to be, but we'll see what happens once it sits for a few hours.

I sprayed both pans with oven cleaner and they have been sitting for about five and a half hours. Let's open them and see how they are. Now you can see that a lot of that gunk that was in the pan has been liquefied, so we're going to rub it a little bit to loosen everything up and this will definitely need another Sulkin. I'll spray them again, let them sit overnight. You see the crowd inside and we'll rinse it off. I'm not sure how good that will look on camera. Well, it turns out this is the larger of the two.

It's a marked Wagner, we're fans, you'll be able to see it better once it's completely cleaned, but you can see he removed a lot of stuff from the bottom, it still has a little bit of dirt on it, it seems to have got some rust off pretty well and there's a lot of it on the inside. I'm going to leave this one aside. I'll wash it a little better later before spraying it again. I'll see you on my other pan, it's working, yeah. anything you see, it's really liquefied, a lot of things now, this pan here I didn't scrape at all, but you can see it really removed a lot of old gunk, if there's still some long left here and some inside, I don't see it.

There's a lot there for markings, but this is really a small pan anyway, but it has the letter B on it. Get this on camera, if you can see it there next to my thumb, there's a lowercase letter B which is a mold number and Wagoner, where did he do that? many of his unmarked pans, so even though there aren't any, he doesn't say scale it, whatever the size of the skeleton on the bottom, like that other unmarked Wagner I showed you. I'm pretty sure this is an unmarked Wagner winter pan and that is a nice little pan, it's very thin, but anyway I'll give them a scrub, spray them again and come back in the morning and we'll see how they look , so I'm not sure if I mentioned it.

This already, but between applications of oven cleaner you will want to scrub them with salt and warm water or hot water is even better. I scrape this off a little and dry them well. You don't have to dry them on a stove, but rather clean them. lower them with the high side and let them dry well before applying the next application on top of the cleaner. Okay, I'll give this a little more oven cleaner, let it soak for a while and I think this will just need one more trip. I also had those fans dipped in oven cleaner.

I'm going to move on to the next thing, you're going to have to deal with restoring cast iron and that's rust, try removing rust from a pan like this for example, you can do it. being a real pain is like trying to sweep up baby powder with a broom; you can get most of it out but you never get it all out and there is always a little residue left no matter what you do. The two most common ways to get rid of it. rust on cast iron is vinegar you can use, for example, if I wanted to remove the rust from the inside of this old teapot, I could fill it with warm water, mix in a fairly strong vinegar solution and let it soak for a couple of days. and it would remove the rust.

The downside to vinegar is that if you have something that has a very smooth, almost polished surface, the vinegar will etch the surface and make it a little rough, not really rough, but you lose that kind of really fine polish. finishing, the other way to deal with rust is through a process called electrolysis. Electrolysis works similarly to electroplating. It's not actually electroplating in the sense that it doesn't dissolve the metal in a solution and use electricity to be positive on some other element, but it does reduce. Rust removes it physically and also changes it chemically. I'll explain it a little later, when I show you the actual process.

Electrolysis also works to remove grime from a pan. You can use it as a one-step process to remove rust and remove it. Burton buildup, it takes longer to do it that way. What I normally do is use both processes. I'll remove most of the grime from a pan with oven cleaner and then dump it into the electrolysis tank to remove the last of the dirt. and remove the rust, so what I'm going to do is put this little tray in my electrolysis equipment. Show you how it works. This is my electrolysis tank. It's a pretty simple matter.

All you need is a large plastic bag with four electrodes and a battery. Well it may sound a little strange to use electricity to clean iron, it is actually a very safe process as long as you keep two things in mind first, never use electrolysis on anything on cast iron that has been chrome or nickel plated and never use stainless steel . Because it contains chromium and nickel, if you use this process on something that has been chrome or nickel plated, it will produce a toxic metal solution. If you ever saw the movie Erin Brokovich, the big problem was hexavalent chromium and that's what you need.

You will achieve this by placing a piece of chrome or stainless steel in this tank and running electricity through it, so don't do that for your electrodes. If you want to use cast iron or just plain old mild steel that isn't coated, these are pieces of angle iron from an old bed frame, but you can use all the pieces of rebar, cookie sheets work as cookie sheets. small, cheap biscuits, as long as they're not teflon coated and that's all you really need, tank electrodes and the battery charger I'm going to fill. Combine this with water and mix the electrolyte solution and then we'll discuss a little bit more about battery charges and once that's all done, we'll turn it on and I'll show you how it works.

I have my tank full of water. By the way, it holds 18 gallons. You will need to calculate how many gallons of water the particular hole in your tank holds. Let's mix the electrolyte solution. The electrolyte solution is nothing more than baking soda. Baking soda is sodium carbonate not to be confused with sodium bicarbonate, whichIt's baking soda, it acts a little differently. You'll find it in your laundry soap pile and it costs about three or four dollars a box. You'll want to use about a heaping teaspoon, about a heaping tablespoon of baking soda per gallon. of water.

I use a level of 1/2 cup or every five gallons, so I have about a cup and a half of baking soda. Here your measurements don't have to be very precise as long as you don't go too far. with it because if you put too much baking soda it doesn't seem to work as well as a little less, stir well, let it dissolve and I'll come back when I'm ready to set. and start running the system, my solution is all mixed up and I'm going to put the tray I'm going to clean in the solution. Now I can't see my scope in the sun.

You want to make sure that you have a decent electrical connection, so if you want to turn it over, you may have to take some sandpaper and shine it in a place where you will connect the wire to the object you are trying to clean in the solution. . make sure it doesn't touch any of the electrodes or the bottom of the tank and you should use something non-conductive as a crossbar, although these wires that connect the electrodes to each other are insulated, it's still a good idea, now we'll connect. the power source which happens to be a battery charger you connect the negative output of the charger to the object you are trying to clean and it is going to give me a hard time.

I had used my tripod but it's windy and every time you try to use it, it goes overboard, so I have to do this with one hand, connect the positive to the electrodes and plug in the battery charger. I'm going to put the camera down for a second to get that nice handheld shot and When you're off, you can see the startup light here, but it's starting to bubble up a little bit. Those bubbles are the other thing you have to be careful about with this process which is hydrogen gas, just like charging a battery, this will produce hydrogen gas and on the other hand. electrodes will produce oxygen so you should do this outside, it doesn't produce a huge amount of gas but you still need to be careful because you really don't want to create your own home version of the Hindenburg disaster and yes dog. sniffing me out here, so if you hear it snorting, that's what it is, as long as you don't put nickel or chromium in this and only use iron or steel, that solution won't be toxic, so you can throw it wherever it can reach. rusty, it will probably turn black and nasty if you are cleaning the dirt off, but that's it, electrolysis works.

Another thing I should mention is that the battery rotates on its own. There are two types of battery chargers, automatic and manual. This is a manual charger. You must use a manual. Battery charger An automatic charger detects the charge that the battery is putting on the charger and will reduce its output as the battery charges. This electrolysis tank does not put enough charge on a charger for an automatic charger to work, it will think the battery is fully charged and will shut itself off anyway. That's electrolysis. I'll let this run for six or eight hours. The hotter the solution, the faster it will work.

Ideally, you should do this on a terrace in a pleasant place. hot sunny day, but it is what it is, let it play out for a while. I'll come back and check it out and see what we get. I forgot to mention. I'll put a link in the description of this video to a guy who does a very good job of setting up and explaining an electrolysis tank. I was a little quick to read this just to get on, but he does a really good job showing you how to build one and how it works now.

You're probably getting tired of watching me scrub pans, so I finished these two. This pan is completely clean. Every bit of old and grime was removed, but it wasn't very embedded to begin with, but I cleaned it very well. This pan still has a little bit of stuff left on the back, but it's not done cleaning up yet. Now this pan is ready to go. Almost if you look closely you can see it has a little rust on it, it doesn't. There's nothing embedded or anything, but it's just a little bit of coloration on the pan, you can see it more on the back, but it's not really bad, so what I'm going to do is show you a pan hack that has just one light layer, this is mainly a kind of powdery oxide that got into the pores a little.

I'll show you a trick to get rid of that, but this pan has a little more rust on it, you can see around you. The inside edge here can hopefully be seen and at this length here it's a little more oxidized, so I'm going to run this through the electrolysis bath before I try to season it and before I do anything else with any of these. I'm going to go out and get the tray that's been in the electrolysis and see how it goes. I unplugged my battery charger. Always unplug the charger before connecting or disconnecting cables.

Try not to let them fall into the water and let's get this guy out. and see how it looks oh yeah, that looks really good. I'm going to take that on the side and rub it and see where we are, maybe it needs to go back in but I don't think so, it looks like it has almost all the rust removed, we'll see how it goes. This is that little pan, the little rusty pan that I had in the electrolysis tank, it was there for four hours and if you remember how rusty it was, you can see it is. everything is gone, it's nice bare metal and clean, it's a little dark.

I really like the kind of results you get with electrolysis and I really encourage you to take a chance on, well, it's not even a chance to go ahead and build an electrolysis cell and use it. To restore your pans, this is like I say, for four hours, electrolysis works by a couple of different means. First, the bubbles will help physically loosen any crust on the pan, and as it loses rust, it will simply flake off. A slightly alkaline solution of calcium or sodium carbonate helps dissolve the grease and oil found in the dirt there and ultimately chemically changes the rust, the electricity from hydrogen removes the oxygen from the rust and converts it back in black iron oxide or again. on the griddle to get a nice dark, clean, smooth finish with no rust, so what I'm going to do is take this pan, put it in the electrolysis tank and then I'll come back and show you how to remove some very fine rust from something which would otherwise be clean, okay this is that pan that has a little rust on it that we wanted to remove like I said this is the equivalent of sweeping up flour we're on it The last thing you can't sweep up, it's been on low heat for a couple of three minutes, well, more than that, enough that it has warmed up the sides.

Well, we're not even close to frying it. You still touch it without screaming, but. The sides are nice and hot, so I'm going to turn off the heat. What you do now is take whatever fat or oil you're going to use, season your pan. I use clarified butter and put a little bit of it in there and let it melt. once it's all melted, take a piece of paper towel and rub it, take everything out of the pan, wet it well with melted butter or oil, whatever you're using, the C's on your pan, take out the inside, take out the outside, I can't.

I actually see my viewfinder because I have my light behind the camera, so I'm not sure if you can see what I'm doing, but wet everything well, including the hand bolt, and we'll let it sit on the burner. is off and let it sit for four or five minutes. This has been sitting for four or five minutes. Take a piece of dry paper towel, wipe the handle so you can manipulate it, and simply wipe off the excess oil. Now what should happen is the warm oil will act as a sort of solvent and help lift the rust from the pores of the pan.

You can see some rust and dirt that was still there. The interior is quite clean. Most of the rusty rust was on the. outside you can see it's a little bit there, you see it's a little bit more red, well just give it a good rub, it wasn't in too bad shape so I think I got it in one, but if you have to you have to get it. All the oil has been cleaned off, go ahead and if it's still warm, melt more butter or lard, whatever you're using, and keep cleaning it off. Look at that little bit of red at the bottom and keep wiping it off until there's no more rust on your paper towel. and that's it, after this I'll give it a wash and hot soapy water and it'll be good to go for a season, but I'm not going to season it yet.

That's going to be in my next video where I'm going to show you how to season pans. after you have cleaned and removed them and how to care for them in the long term. I think that'll do it for now, so I'll let you guys go and I hope you enjoyed this video.