I just tried using electrolysis to remove some rust on a winding crown for a 1908 Waltham watch. It worked like the proverbial magic charm. I haven't yet tried it with any clock parts, but we all know how the lantern pinons in American clocks frequently seem to be rusted inside the lantern. I am going to try this with a junk part, to see if it will work to clean up the trunions without hurting the brass hubs or attached wheels.

For the watch parts, I used 2 "D" cells for power, and a chunk of scrap iron as the sacrificial anode.

When I made the electrolyte solution, I didn't measure: I just dumped what looked like about a tablespoon of Washing Soda into a gallon of water, and shook it up. As the guy says in the attached file, "This ain't rocket science."

My container is a plastic pint ice cream container.

I just attached clip leads to one end of two pieces of wire, and taped the other end of the wires to the positive and negative poles of a pair of "D" cells that I taped together end to end to give about 3 VDC. I was pretty careful not to touch the two leads to each other, since there is no "Off" switch. :-) I used wooden spring clothespins to hold each lead against the inside of the container. OF course, for bigger stuff, you'd' probably want a gallon container, and maybe more power, and heavier clips to hold the stuff in the container so they can't touch, but the principle is the same.

Here's a pdf file of the best article I found.

Electrolysis_-_Copy.pdf (221 Kb, 365 downloads) Electrolysis pdf

David this looks a very good solution which I'm sure will be extremely useful in saving watch parts.

I've saved the article for future reference.

Thanks for posting

Mike

Very interesting David, great find and thank you for posting.