A Comedy of Errors and Rust

Friend: "Hey D. how are you?" 

Me: "Who the fuck uses a century-old Milo plate to replace a shitty mail-order York?" 

Friend: "Uh, what?"  

Me: "There's like 30 perfectly good non-irreplaceable plates stacked in a corner, and they're using the irreplaceable antiques to curl. TO CURL. I'm almost glad we don't have a squat cage, because if we did, they'd be curling in that. I swear, one of these days I'm going to walk into the bathroom and find a lost van Gogh being used as an ass rag." 

Friend: "...um...that's...terrible?" 

Me: "And I'm stuck restoring them. Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to replicate early 1900s century rustproofing? DO YOU!? It's made out of driveway, mostly. The rest is just about equal parts of everything flammable and caustic in your garage thrown into an oven and baked for hours."

Pictured: The above conversation, 5 seconds in the future.

This has been going on for weeks.

For those that aren't aware, for the last few months, I've been working with a few dedicated individuals to restore Oliphant's Academy of Physical Culture, a historic gym in Toronto. How I came to be involved in such a project is a series of improbably coincidences that I will address in another post.

In the meanwhile, there are those damnable weights.

The gym is filthy with them.

For most of my time at Oliphant's the age of our barbells was a concern secondary to finding the weight you wanted to lift in a small sea of unorganized iron. That was until about a few weeks ago when, through correspondence with the author of The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban, I discovered the Iron History forums. Now, through correspondence with the lovely individuals of that forum (Joe, Reuben, Tim and Paul, my hat is off to you), I'm discovering that our barbells have a history that dates back to 1912.

This is a mixture of good, bad and ugly.

The Good 

These barbells, dumbbells and plates are rarities, spanning from original 1912 pattern Milo barbells to the very first series of York plates ever produced. It's astonishing. Every time I bring out my handy collection of wrenches, I find a new bit of treasure.

The Bad 

Until the Iron History boys identified them, no-one had any idea that this equipment was anything but old. For years, it was treated with what I imagine in my darker hours as everything short of outright contempt. The old boys brigade of the gym spent the last half century distributing antique plates throughout every set barbell and dumbbell in the gym. My morning ramble through the barbell sets has become an Easter-egg hunt fueled by my new-found obsession with historic weights and my apoplectic rage at having to uncrew, pry and sometimes chisel those antique plates from their rusty prisons.

The Ugly

I haven't seen so much rust and filth since my last trip through Buffalo. My co-conspirator in the task of restoring these weights, Stefanie, has thus far done most of the research for this (Stefanie, by the way, has a fantastic little web-store for handmade baby clothes. Visit it.). Her first major suggestion, EvapoRust, turned out to be the least horrific product in my arsenal, and possibly the most useful. If ever you need to remove lots of rust from anything without stripping away valuable metal, this stuff is utterly worth it. I've been using the same 5 liters of it for weeks now, and it steadfastly refuses to stop working. It is to rust what Jason Statham is to to un-punched faces.

This is what EvapoRust looks like to the suburbs of Buffalo.

In the future, however, I have nothing but lacquer stripper and awful, awful japanning to look forward to. Some bright mind in Oliphant's past covered many of the weights with gold spray-paint. For that, I've been using heavy-duty oven-cleaner. Here is how the process works:

• Blast everything in sight with lye-based cleaner.
• Put it all in a garbage bag and leave it overnight.
• The next day anything that isn't iron or antique rustproofing should be a colorful mush that washes off with vinegar. 
• If you haven't inhaled the lye or gotten any on your skin (wear rubber gloves), congratulations! You've avoided a trip to the hospital.

The only thing the lye seems to leave untouched is the japanning, which we're going to get stuck removing with heavier solutions.

Oh, the japanning.

For those unfamiliar with the early 1900's, japanning was a process by which asphaltum, turpentine and a collection of other horrible substances were baked into metal to make it rust proof. Stefanie has been looking up recipes on how to do this without making either of our apartments smell like a road resurfacing project. More on that when our first package of asphaltum arrives.

So there's my angry little synopsis of my restoration work.

Go lift something.

Newly Restored Oliphant Plates
The bottle behind them contains EvapoRust,
now black with the souls of murdered rust.