Bulkhead rust treatment

Have it bead blasted and zinc sprayed

AWEM

Get it galvanized

Seconded - it's harder to get a decent paint finish onto it with galv but if you can find a local firm who have a bit of skill galvanising (and that bit is important!) then there's little will match galv, filling with warm waxoyl and a couple of coats of paint.

Zinc spraying is a probably less risky process (never had it done on anything) but not so effective in protecting the inside of the bulkhead, I take it Andrew is talking about hot spray as opposed to Galavafroid or similar.

Regards

William MacLeod

On or around 12 Dec 2005 04:01:05 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com enlightened us thusly:

From what I gather, hot-dip galv is apt to give you a distorted bulkhead. Presumably the electroplating method is OK though.

Thats interesting, didnt know there was an electroplating method.

How good is galvafroid?

Gerald

On or around Mon, 12 Dec 2005 17:55:08 -0000, "Idris" enlightened us thusly:

's good paint. not the same as galvanising.

techincally, galvanising is in fact electrical I believe - the word has the same root as glavanometer, for example.

it involves a tank of some sort of solution with lots of zinc in it and presumably lots of volts.

That's electroplating - IIRC zinc galvanising is simply dipping the part into molten zinc and withdrawing it letting a layer of zinc harden on the surface - the "Galv" in this context refers to the Galvanic effect where you have two metals in contact with each other in an electrolyte (water mostly) and they generate current - the way this works for galvanised steel is that in this setup the zinc is a more reactive metal than the steel and as such it sacrifices itself through electron transfer when there's an electrolyte present - the steel doesn't suffer because the zinc sacrifices itself.

P.

If you have a firm who don't know what they're doing having only done things like posts of thick steel and the like then chances are you're going to end up with a rather hard to fit bulkhead, yes. Not the case with the one I had done though, and I've seen plenty others.

That's different again! From the talk of bead blasting I assumed Andrew meant hot zinc spraying, rather similar to hot dip galvanising than electroplating.

For the chap asking about Galavafroid, I did a series II rear cappings with that and it's petrol cap and it wore through/off in places in less than two years. Looks very dull as well, doesn't age that nicely compared to real galv, but then that vehicle does live on the North East coast and there is a lot of salt on the road compared to other parts of the UK.

Regards

William MacLeod

Absolutely. Had my trailer done 10 years ago with a Metco zinc spray gun and it's stood up to alsorts of misuse very well.

AWEM

you're

galvanising

cappings

When they 'hot spray' with a Metco gun the part infact only gets barely warm - the zinc impacts on the newly bead blasted surface and forms small interlocking 'cowpats' that mechanically bond onto the slightly roughened surface. I have a rather old Metco gun (maybe

1960's) that uses oxy-acetylene as the heat source and compressed air to drive a turbine that pulls an 1/8" zinc wire through the flame. You can actually spray zinc onto wood, and form an apparently solid surface without charring the wood.

AWEM

Ok so who can recomend a firm that knows what they are doing to gavlanise my bulkhead without distorting it.

I based in Northamptonshire.

Gerald

They are all doomed, I tell you, doomed.