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Rust prevention for 10-year-old's project

I'm a 10-year-girl who wants to do a science project on how prevent rust. How do you prevent rust with stuff you use in cosmetics, kitchen, painting,or things we use in everyday life?

Jody [last name deleted for privacy by Editor]
Student - Brownstown, Mississippi
2003

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The simplest way to prevent corrosion is to stop the corroding chemicals coming into contact with the metal you want to protect. This can be done by painting the metal, coating it with a plastic layer or coating it with another metal that doesn't visibly corrode so readily; this last method is called electroplating. There is also a technique called electropolishing that will reduce the rate at which some metals will corrode. You can also make sure that the metal you want to protect doesn't get used in conditions that make it corrode!

Trevor Crichton
R&D practical scientist
Chesham, Bucks, UK
2003

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2003

For a good science project, you could show how home materials can be used. Coatings such as: grease, lard, Vaseline, camphor from drug store, spray paint, materials which convert surface to non rusting (Ospho [affil links]), paste floor wax, WD-40 [on eBay or Amazon] , frying pan spray (PAM), motor oil, gun oil, lip stick, roofing tar, paraffin wax, pine tree rosin. Another one is the sticky wax ring which seals under a commode melted into some oil. Leaves a sticky oil which stays in place. Also borax [affil links] dissolved in water as a paint. Get a sheet of bare sheet metal, mark off 2" x 4" spaces with ink marker, write test material in space and carefully coat each space, let dry. Then expose outside, carefully making notes on condition of each space weekly. Give conclusions as report showing test panel. Option is to do indoor and outdoor test panels.

Joseph Scott
- Nederland, Texas

How do you do this project? I used ranch, oil, butter, etc. and they look differently but they still kind of rusted. And I need to do a graph, and I do not know what graph to use a line graph or a bar graph? help!

Sara A [last name deleted for privacy by Editor]
- Torrance, California
March 22, 2008

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That depends on what you intend to graph, Sara. Because ranch, oil, and butter are each distinct materials it would seem to me that that each should have its own bar rather than each being a piece of a line, right?

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
March 26, 2008

Can rusting be prevented? Hi, I'm in 5th grade and I am doing a science project on "can rusting be prevented?" I put machine oil on my iron nails and put them in containers with 1.salt and water, 2.tap water, and 3.bleach and water. does anyone have any other ideas how to prevent rust? thanks a whole lot!

Julie B [last name deleted for privacy by Editor]
student - San Diego, California
March 21, 2008

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Try a couple of different kinds of paint, try rubbing with candle wax, try car wax [on eBay or Amazon] . Joseph Scott gave a long list above. Good luck.

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
March 26, 2008

Hello, My name is sumana and I am 13. my science fair is coming up in a bit. I am researching what type of paint best protects metal from rusting. what do you think?

sumana
student - dar es salaam
March 27, 2011

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March 28, 2011

Yes, suman, that should be a good one.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

My daughter is in third grade and is doing a science project. We need to figure out how to draw a chart with the information we have. She is doing the "which liquid will rust the nail faster." Thanks

Arlene M.
- Dover, Florida
November 27, 2011

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November 28, 2011

Hi, Arlene.

Making a graph is in a way like translating her report into Spanish or French. That is, the first step is to clearly understand the results in English, and the second step is to translate them into a graph to quantify them. I make this point because people sometimes expect that a graph is going to magically make everything clear, and unfortunately it won't. A graph is merely another language -- one that tries to use numbers.

Her experiment should indicate that the choices she makes like which liquid to use (an "independent variable") causes some difference in results, like the amount of time before the first rust or the amount of rust ("the dependent variable").

So make a bar for each independent variable, whose length will be some number of units long. For example, if she used 4 different liquids and they each took a different numbers of days before the first appearance of rust, she has four bars she can present on a graph. Or if the nails lost different amounts of weight in the different liquids she could chart that.

If she has no numbers (no "quantitative data"), but merely has generalities ( only "qualitative data") like "very rusty", "very little rust", and "moderate rust", then she has to "invent" a translation to hard numbers. She can take a lesson from TV ads about that: You've probably heard that Brand X beauty cream "reduces the appearance of fine lines by 78%". What on earth does that even mean?! It obviously means they invented their own translation.

Your daughter can decide that "very rusty" is 90% rusty, and "very little rust" is 10% rusty, and "moderate rust" is 50% and graph it that way. Good luck.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey