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Sale on terrible ideas? I'll take two!
Sir James A:
Bad idea #1 - Hydrochloric acid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrochloric_acid#Safety)
Bad idea #2 - Stainless steel mail
Combine them, and what do you get?
Failure. Horrible, horrible failure! Before soaking:
The surprise? Unevenly coated now, along with, literally, *hundreds* of rivets that partially dissolved and fell out! >:(
So I've got a solid 8 or 10 hours to go just replacing them. It looks like roughly 3 out of 4 rivets all came out. Auuughhh.
At least it got *kinda* shiny.
About that cement mixer and sand IceFalcon recommended for cleaning and polishing ......... yeah, should have done that. Definitely should have done that.
Sigh.
Edit: I got the idea from Patrick Kelly here - http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=28761
Sir Edward:
Oh crap. That's really not good.
Using an acid wash can remove the zinc from galvanized steel, but you would probably want to dilute it first. I have no idea what it does to stainless, beyond what you're showing us here.
Sir James A:
Updated picture:
After some closer inspection, I found out something interesting.
The dark mail in the corner is the untouched voider. The other voider, where it's wider at the bottom, is material I took off my hauberk and used to extend the depth of the voider.
The extended part (not original) is shinier than the rest of the mail. And guess what else? Zero rivets missing. And no rust ... but the original voider has lots of rivets missing, didn't shine up as much, *and* it's already got some rust forming in just hours. The part I added looks like stainless should. The other, just doesn't.
I think I got mild steel voiders instead of stainless. The acid shouldn't have done anything to the stainless except take the coating off, unless I left it overnight or longer. It takes hours and hours of soaking time just to etch stainless with that acid. I've seen people say they soak it overnight to etch stainless. This doesn't seem like it should have happened.
I sent the pics to IceFalcon to see what he thinks. Fingers crossed.
Sir Edward:
Well, that would certainly explain a thing or two. Acid etching of mild steel works surprisingly quickly, and when I was telling my lady about this, it occurred to me that those rivets might have been mild. You might be on to something.
Sir Wolf:
hmmm stainless mail with mild rivets. who know eh? sigh. that stinks man. hope you get some closure on this deal!
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