YouTube is awesome

When I first heard and saw people using YouTube I was thinking who in the world is going to watch 30 second clips of people acting dumb.  Now several years later I must admit that YouTube has saved my life and taught me a thing or two.  I have found clips on how to repair my trucks window regulator, hunt wild hogs, and how to use electrolysis.

I have been telling all of you lately of my current obsession with buying cast iron on the cheap and trying to clean and rehab it to new like conditions.  Now this has been lots of elbow grease and my wife wondering when I will go to bed and stop scraping skillets.  

With my new method of cleaning, I can stop the scrubbing, and oiling and just put the iron in the 5 gallon bucket with some sodium carbonate and hook up the battery charger and presto!  In lots of time depending on the carbon and rust factor you have bare metal clean cast iron.

Watching all of these videos I learned an important part of electrolysis and that is to buy a "Manual" battery charger.  Very important because all the new chargers that have the jump battery built into them are automatic charges.  I picked the charger above from "Big Lots" for 50 bucks and it was 20% off sunday so that made it 40 dollars.  That is a deal on a 2-10-50 amp manual charger.

I forgot to get a before picture of the pan above.  This is after 2 hours in the electro-cooker.  Once you remove the metal from the science experiment you have to take a scrub brush and get the loose carbon and rust off of the pan.

Before I put the pan in the solution I didn't even know it had this no. 5 and 81/2 IN. stamp on the bottom.

Here is a shot of the inside part.  This skillet is probably 50 to 75 years old at least.  You can tell a little on the age if they have a ring on the bottom.  The ring was on skillets during the days when people cooked on wood stoves.  The skillet has a nice flat and smooth as butter feel to the metal.  I would put this in the crepe making department in my pantry.

It is hard to tell the difference in collor.  The skillet on the right is the one I just used electrolysis on and has a silvery metalic look to the pan.  The skillet on the left is one I picked up about two months ago and heat cleaned the rust off.  Once I dried the electrolysis pan it instantly started to surface rust.  I pulled out the bottle of veggie oil and sealed it real quick to stop this from going any further.

All of this started when my wife wanted me to pick up an extra set of cast iron to use at our house.  We have one set at our cabin and now miss it at our house.  Me being the cheap person wanted to buy used and found lots of rusty gold.  I had heard of alternative methods of cleaning cast iron and came across the video earlier in this post.  Now I have volunteered to teach a cast iron cooking class and have learned mountains of information about cast iron and how to care and restore it.  The internet is our friend!