Getting to grips with 90 years of rust

With a project that is anything else but straight forward, life has recently decided to also put it’s own special spanner in the works in the most cruel way and pulled us away from the project for most of winter and the spring. This has obviously delayed progress and taken the wind out of our sails (!!) a fair bit but now we are looking at progressing with the practical aspects of building the barge and starting with the rust removal.

rust removal tools — A variety of rust needs a variety of tools to remove it

The barge interior goes from a heavily rusted area all the way round where water sat in it (whenever it rained) through to paint-covered areas above this where the steel is virtually untouched. The lower sections and floor are again like new having been covered in a thick layer of airless silt for most of its life providing a nice protective coating against corrosion.

Working on the basis that we should start with the heaviest corrosion first we have been using an air chisel to literally vibrate the heavy rust off the hull – this has the added bonus of vibrating the rust from the exterior at the same time so greatly reducing the work required on the outside. Once done we followed this up with a needle scaler for all the edges and corners and each section very quickly started to look like lots of separate steel sections riveted together, rather than one big rusty/muddy lump. Although a fairly industrial/brutal process it does help reveal any weak spots in the steelwork which may have gone un-noticed with a softer approach, only to become apparent much later on – these will get welded as we go.

These tools are all well and good for heavy rust but not at all useful on the better parts of the hull where rust is minimal. To take care of these areas we have got stuck in with a combination of twisted wire brushes in the angle grinder and media-blasting for all those hard-to-get-at areas in corners and around the rows of rivets.

Air tool rust removal — Removing the thickest rust with the air chisel

It’s taken a small while to find the best combination of tools and technique but by doing each section (between ribs) at a time we are now starting to get a good workflow going and the barge is looking like it’s ready for it’s complete interior spruce-up! We’ll also be cutting out the worst of the bent/corroded rib sections (and putting in new steel) and then experimenting with rust converting primer to see how well they finish the job off.