I was in town last week with an hour to kill before work and stopped at an Estate Sale at a the Howard Johnson's and found 2 iron skillets for $10 a piece. I could make out one was a Wagner and the other just looked the same. I started cruising some of the cast iron pages on Facebook and learned a lot. I was going to set up an electrolysis tank and use the battery charger but read a lot of people were using a lye bath to clean them.
They said Ace Hardware was about the only place left that sells lye other than for soap making. At Ace I found a jar that said 100% lye drain cleaner and that is good stuff. Here are 2 poor pictures of what I started with. They looked much worse in person than what the picture looks like.
I mixed 2 gallons of water with the lye and put the pans in yesterday at 1PM. My brother asked if there was room for his Vollrath skillet so we added to the bucket. Here are some pictures of what 25 hours in the lye did for them.
They are all back in the lye for more cleaning. The pan that I could not see any marking on is an unmarked Wagner. From what I read they sold their pans with the logo as premium skillets and the unmarked pans were sold at discount at place like Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck.
The lye will remove all the crud and then they will be scrubbed with a scratch pad. The lye only removes the crud and not rust so they will have to go in a bucket of 1 part vinegar and 1 part water to neutralize the lye and remove the light rust layer.
Then I will season them with flax seed oil. I asked on the cast iron sites about flax oil and received no responses so it must be proprietary information to SMF only.............lol.
The lye is very dangerous when it contacts your skin and eyes so glasses and rubber gloves must be worn. A few small splashes that I didn't even know about felt like a bug bite a few minutes later.
I will post some pictures as I restore these.
They said Ace Hardware was about the only place left that sells lye other than for soap making. At Ace I found a jar that said 100% lye drain cleaner and that is good stuff. Here are 2 poor pictures of what I started with. They looked much worse in person than what the picture looks like.
I mixed 2 gallons of water with the lye and put the pans in yesterday at 1PM. My brother asked if there was room for his Vollrath skillet so we added to the bucket. Here are some pictures of what 25 hours in the lye did for them.
They are all back in the lye for more cleaning. The pan that I could not see any marking on is an unmarked Wagner. From what I read they sold their pans with the logo as premium skillets and the unmarked pans were sold at discount at place like Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck.
The lye will remove all the crud and then they will be scrubbed with a scratch pad. The lye only removes the crud and not rust so they will have to go in a bucket of 1 part vinegar and 1 part water to neutralize the lye and remove the light rust layer.
Then I will season them with flax seed oil. I asked on the cast iron sites about flax oil and received no responses so it must be proprietary information to SMF only.............lol.
The lye is very dangerous when it contacts your skin and eyes so glasses and rubber gloves must be worn. A few small splashes that I didn't even know about felt like a bug bite a few minutes later.
I will post some pictures as I restore these.
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