Showing posts with label Badge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Badge. Show all posts

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Ketchup Anyone?

This post is all about cleaning up the nasty looking badge I removed from Ms. Rusty.  Initially I cleaned it up using the usual kerosene but it didn’t do much to improve the appearance.  I then  purchased some metal polish, specifically Eagle One Nevr-Dull because it is supposed to work well on all metals.  One a side note – I wonder why all these automotive type agents have hyphens in their brand names? (Evapo-Rust, Break-Away, Nevr-Dull, WD-40, etc.)  Is it a requirement that I don’t know about?

Never dull

Using the Nevr-dull improved things a little bit, but the badge still didn’t look very good and this new product was taking more elbow grease than I’d like.  So I searched online for ways to clean tarnished brass.  Several different recipes of salt/vinegar combinations came up in my Google search, but my favorite “remedy” was to use ketchup!

So, I took the badge and soaked it in a dish of ketchup overnight.

 badge in ketchup mmm – tasty Laughing out loud

After rinsing the badge it actually looks pretty good!

Front  close-up post ketchupBack  back after ketchup

It was after the ketchup treatment that the Nevr-Dull really showed it’s stuff.  I spent about 10-15 minutes polishing the badge and it looks much better.

Front  Front - clean Back  Back - clean

Now the badge isn’t perfect, so it will need a bit of tinkering to get it bent back into the correct shape around the edges.  I also need to spend some extra time to get the tarnish out of the crevices on the back.  Hopefully I can figure out how to do that, and get it done, by the time Ms. Rusty is ready for her “new” badge.