Soooo the one thing I hate about these tables is the rusty slats, water and just grime from rusting.
I know these will deteriorate. But would it be dumb to paint the slats? Help on rust and keep the slats looking better longer?
So to paint slats or not to paint on my new table? What are your thoughts?
Wasted effort. In a week they will look like a
part that fell out of a blast furnace.
first painting is a crazy thing to do…the paint will burn off and gives fumes…not to mention it will not last long sitting in water…
now to the rusty and gross water…why not use some proper plasma cutting additive in the water…?
there are may options out there…Greencut…Sterlingcool…even some decent home ideas…but I would tend to stick with tried and proven proper additives…
water with additive kept at a PH of 9 or 10 will not rust or get gross…
I have my slats for 2 years and no rust…I have flipped them around and ground them down a bit…but still look good…
My slats don’t look bad, I ran for a short time with regular water and they looked terrible after a few days. I added sterling cool and the slats now look fine. They don’t look new but they don’t look all rusty. I am a big proponent of the sterling cool product.
Yea i filled mine with softened water to leak test me welds on the water table and with in the hour the slats were brown.
i can run my table for a few hours…drain it and the slats or the metal I have cut never rusts…days or weeks later…then I just refill and away I go…
I do have a reclaim tank and pump with filters so I reuse my mixture and just add to it as I need to…
Where do people get your supplies?
I see DIY mixtures that say amazon, but when I look its Sodium NiTRATE not TRITE for sale.
And the pre mix’s I heard are expensive per gallon.
Sterling Cool $155 . Will last you months if you recycle your fluid in holding tank.
@Bigdaddy2166 is right…again…
A 5 gallon pail can last a year or longer
if you drain the table into a holding tank and add a filter too…
keep in mind that 5 gallons mixes a 20:1 ratio…meaning you get over 100 gallons of mixture…and if you thin it a bit it can stretch a bit more…but if you keep the Ph at 9 to 10…you are in the perfect zone…
And if your a hobbiest like a lot of us it lasts a really long time. I am still on my first batch of sterling cool from May. I have a holding tank but no filter, it comes out of the tank looking like brand new! I was going to filter it but don’t see the need. It settles out on the bottom of the tank and at this rate 5 years from now I may need to clean the tank out.
there is a problem with the sludge at the bottom on the tank…that is it takes chemicals to prevent it from rusting…this your Ph levels are harder to maintain…
if you filtered out the sludge your Ph levels would remain m ore balanced and thus less use of the Sterling cool…
I tend adding more water than Sterlingcool as I go along…
I use plasma green 1050 additive. No rust.
You could cut some slats out of stainless or copper. Kind of expensive but they won’t rust.