Brass Plates

sparkyskey

Hi everyone - back after a long hiatus. Geez you have been busy - its taken me three weekends to read through and catch up on everything!

I am after some advice please, as I’ve done something, in hindsight, that was extremely stupid :-(.

I left a couple of rather important plates and escutcheons in a cleaner for a little too long, in fact there could have been a small piece of steel/iron in there as well (eeek). The result is that the copper component of the brass has been bought to the surface. I’ve looked a little on the internet and the only references I can find regard brass wind instruments (like saxophones), where they refer to this red colouration as “red rot” (normally bought about by the acid in saliva). There is no soltuon that I can find other than cutting out the offending piece and replacing with a patch.

I have tried heating the brass with a small blow torch, to bring the tin component more to the surface. This does improve the red colouration problem slightly - but leaves the brass with a silver sheen finish to it.

Has some one out there come across this before? Any other suggestions??

Cheers Sarah

Tom Gordon

Hydrochloric acid and nitric acid will clean brass but if you only have one of them, then you will take only the copper or the zinc out of the brass leaving it looking either coppery or white instead of brassy.
Just get the Brasso out because it is only the very top surface that is affected.

Huntlocks

Hi Sarah

Did you get your Milners finished? Have I missed the pics?

sparkyskey

Hi Richard - no, you havn’t missed any pics. I came to a bit of a standstill last year. I don’t know if you remember but there was an advertising sheet pasted to the inside of the front door. This had been fairly badly damaged over the years and was not in great shape in places - but as a whole was still distinguishable. My dilemma is whether or not to try and restore the sheet as best I can or just give it up and take it the whole thing off. Then our trip came along and time just seemed to fly by. I have been thinking about getting back to it for the last couple of months - but nothing yet :-)

Any thoughts? One of the members on this site does recreate transfers (I’d need to look back to see who it was) - but I haven’t a clue what should be used.

Otherwise we are both well and the brass plaques are getting there (although some of the fissures are proving hard to clean out). Lesson learned I guess :-)

Cheers Sarah