Refinished 1000lbs of old plates...

[AdamW]

So a friend and I found a good deal on an immense amount of old 45 pound plates and picked up 34 of them in total. We sold off what we didn't want and got to work refinishing the rest.

This isn't a great picture but you can see how old and rusty they were when we got them. The one plate you can see well was actually in the nicest condition of all of them. There's still 10 more plates not pictured here, haha...


First thing we did was go at them with some really aggressive steel wool and soap and water. This got most of the rust off and got them looking pretty decent really. Some of them had been repainted very very badly so we took a wire brush on an angle grinder and took those ones back down to the bare iron. As you can see they looked a lot better, but still pretty beat up.



Next we hit them all with 2 coats of Tremclad Professional Rust Enamel in flat black. This stuff is tough as shit and fucking awesome.



Finally we repainted all of the letters by hand with metallic silver paint and a paint brush. Took a few hours but now they look better than brand new in my opinion!



Got enough plates to last me the rest of my life now. All in all after spending all the money on the refinishing supplies, I ended up with 12 plates for myself at about $0.30/lb. Pretty good price for any plates, but a great price for plates that look this good in my opinion! Really happy with how they turned out.

[AdamW]

Also resprayed my Prowler. It's not the real deal (had a friend weld it up) but it gets the job done. Looks much better now and hopefully the new paint job will prevent the rusting that was starting.

Old pic (looked a lot worse than this even, this is when it was basically new):


New:

[Corrie]

Looks like it took a lot of work but boy do they look 1000x better. Won't have to worry about getting rust all over everything when you use them either.

Very nice and I bet you can re-sell them for a nice profit if you ever needed to.

One question, did you weigh them after? Did the process remove or add any weight?

[AdamW]

I'll have to re-weigh them and find out. I personally weighed all 34 after we cleaned them and kept the ones that were closest to 45 for myself (I think the heaviest ones I kept were a pair that were 46) so hopefully the paint didn't add anything significant. Pretty much every plate was heavy, some were 47 pounds including some of the 10 "calibrated" York ones in the lot.

[RussB]

I'll have to re-weigh them and find out. I personally weighed all 34 after we cleaned them and kept the ones that were closest to 45 for myself (I think the heaviest ones I kept were a pair that were 46) so hopefully the paint didn't add anything significant. Pretty much every plate was heavy, some were 47 pounds including some of the 10 "calibrated" York ones in the lot.

Were the heavy calibrated plates all very close to one another? If so, might the scale be the problem?

[DRice311]

Nice work Adam - they look 100x better. I was going to ask if you ever drilled holes in them to calibrate, but it looks like you just sold off the ones that were the most off.

.30/lb - What a score. Does that even inlude the money you made back by selling off the heavy ones?

[mstrofbass]

When refinishing cast iron pans, the trick to getting rust off is soaking the pans in hot water and vinegar for twenty minutes or so. Rust comes off really easily, you just have to be able to dry them pretty quickly afterwards. I'm not sure about the logistics of working with something of that size, weight, and quantity, but it's something to consider for next time.

[AdamW]

Were the heavy calibrated plates all very close to one another? If so, might the scale be the problem?

Unfortunately they were all off pretty wildly, we checked on two scales! One of the "calibrated" ones was 44 pounds, some others were as heavy as 46.6! We checked them multiple times and they always came up the same so they were definitely out. I didn't keep the calibrated ones for myself though so no big deal.

Nice work Adam - they look 100x better. I was going to ask if you ever drilled holes in them to calibrate, but it looks like you just sold off the ones that were the most off.

.30/lb - What a score. Does that even inlude the money you made back by selling off the heavy ones?

Thanks! Yeah that includes the money made back after selling off the extras. We paid $0.40/lb for them in the first place then sold a bunch for around $0.75/lb. The guy selling them had gotten them from a gym that went out of business, repossession sort of deal. He didn't want to deal with the hassle of selling small quantities and only wanted to get rid of them all at once so he was sitting on them for a while. Worked out well for us!

[KAG]

That's awesome. I keep looking for good scores like this but there haven't been any around in a while.

[skipbeat]

Awesome deal man. I personally wouldn't have painted the letters back on but hell now you can re-sell them at .9/dollar or higher easily! And if you keep them they look mean as hell too. Your prowler looks nearly identical to the Butcher from Rogue, which is what I bought.. nice.