Is water better at freeing up rusty nuts and bolts than penetrating oil? This guy finds out

The statistician in me went a bit too far:

There’s basically no statistical evidence that there is any real difference. Gibbs might be better than the worst but it isn’t exactly compelling.

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shopping

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I always trust my rusty nuts to water - warm water with some epsom salts - and . . . oh wait . . . nevermind.

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It’s never really a question of whether you can make the nut turn. When you have a critical piece, the question you’re concerned with is whether turning the nut is going to shear the bolt. That’s when every bit counts (and when you add heat if possible, as others have said.)

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Thanks! I was hoping someone would make a whisker graph for his data!

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Take it from a guy who spent many years in front of many boilers, nobody wants to smell like diesel fuel. I am sure it repels bugs, and any other form of life, including humans.

BTW number 2 heating oil is diesel fuel. So much so they dye heating oil pink so law enforcement can tell if trucks are running on heating oil. Regular diesel for trucks is taxed, so it is more expensive.

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Take it from a steamfitter of 40 years whose wrenches all look like this. Penetrating oil does work. I am not sure about the fake rust he created, as It looks like it rusted the exposed threads only. When using penetrating oil on bolts, oil them and rock them back and forth. Small breaks in the rust allow the next dose of oil to get deeper.And as a lot of people said heat is your friend.

Before anyone asks, you bend a cast iron pipe wrench like that by putting a 6 foot piece of 2 inch pipe on the end, and jumping on it.

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ATF/acetone, 50/50, made fresh!
Check!
If the nut is exposed, holding a ball peen, or block of steel tight to a flat of the nut. Ball peen applied to the opposite flat… good, solid taps. Do the same on the other pairs. Reapply weasel-piss.
Repeat as needed.
Heat the nut.
Heat the nut and then hold an ice cube to the bolt, if it can be managed.
Liquify it!

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Needs one more step-

Thermobaric lance, captioned “fuck this, and whatever you’re attached to, as well as the ground beneath you”

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I taught the neighbor kid the trick of loosening a stuck lug nut on a flat tire by using a cross-shaped tire iron. You set the correct socket on the nut, rest the axle-end of the tire iron on the same-height jack, and stomp on one the tire iron’s arms until the nut squeals.

I have some ugly, old galvanized drain pip from the crawlspace just to use as cheater bars.

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Am I the only one that uses phosphoric acid/Diet Coke for rust removal?

Naval jelly?

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Seems extreme. I thought you were supposed to consult a doctor after four hours, and go from there.

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Depending on how much threads are exposed I’ve screwed another nut on the bolt to protect the thread then beat it with a big-ass hammer to loosen it. Sometimes works, sometimes just feels good to whack the bastard.

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Water was included in this video only as a ‘middle finger’ response to viewers who insisted that water was better than the oil penetrants that were presented in a previous Project Farm video, with the aforementioned clueless reviewers describing oil-based penetrants as “snake oil”. This latest video was going to happen anyway. The penetrant head-to-head competition presented in these two videos weeded out those from the running and the top performers will go head-to-head in a third video. Water is nowhere to be found. :slight_smile:

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Well, that makes a bit more sense then.

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99% of the time you would have been right. No shortage of useless click-bait YT vids.

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Yes, sample size way too small here. Doing some quick power calculations if he wants to identify a difference between water and gibbs with a probability of 80% he needs to turn at least 9 nuts each. If he wants to find a difference between freeall and water he needs to turn 20 nuts each.

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I just became an Old. Thanks for the advice.

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