Long story short, I got an amazing deal on a 225 gallon buffer tank yesterday. It was used, and looked pretty orange. I spent more on gas than on the tank itself, thinking at the bare minimum it was worth experimenting with to see if I could whiten it.
Google searches turn up a bunch of people trying to whiten their motorcycle tanks (they have to be boiled and soaked in various acids), and searches of this website turned up nothing. So I decided to create a topic for anyone looking to save some $ and whiten a dirty old tank.
I bought a lot of different acids to experiment with. Looking inside, I could tell that the red coloration was mostly on the interior. Most likely iron and tannins leaching out; the previous owner had a galvanized steel nipple on the tank. And there were some stray leaves inside.
My first experiment whitened the tank to almost-new. I mixed 1 gallon of very hot water and 24 oz. of oxalic acid. Dumped it into the tank and brushed the insides for about an hour, laying the tank over on all sides so it could soak.
When it was finally whitened, I neutralized the acid with 1lb of baking soda (overkill) and about 50 gallons of water.
Now I have a $150, 225 gallon tank that looks pretty decent.
That’s the one! Super nice guy. Oh also, I made a whoopsie in the original post so I edited it. It cost me $150, not $50 lol! $50 would’ve been WAY nicer
I bet it took you WAY less time too! HF was going to be the final experiment if oxalic and muriatic didn’t work. Thank god the oxalic worked; HF gives me the heebie-jeebies
It does deserve respect, But I 2 stepped the entire truck that way as I always do ,They have 10 of them we do every other week, I use HF every other wash, Then an ABF based acid in between, Same soap. Just gotta be careful with it, Windshields in particular.
Yes it did. Honestly I wish I could change my username too, everybody has the coolest names on here. I signed on 6 months ago trying to get information about how to make a cool 4gpm belt drive… Funny how much you can learn being quiet and reading 35k posts
he’s been around for a while though
