How to Remove Rust from Vintage Metal Bobbins
I recently got a vintage White Rotary sewing machine. While it's a cool machine, it takes a non-standard sized bobbin, which can be tricky to find. Luckily, it came with eight bobbins, but some of them were a bit rusty. I didn't want to lose any of them, so I used a dremel and some polishing/sanding bits to clean the rust off. Here's what worked best for me.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a percentage if you make a purchase using these links. I only link to things I like and use!
Materials used:
Since the bobbins were pretty small, I used forceps to hold them while I cleaned off the rust.
Here are the three types of brush that I used. The small brush on the right was the most useful, since most bobbins only had a few spots of rust. I used the brush wheel on the left to clean rust out of the inside of the bobbins.
Here's one of the worst bobbins before cleaning.
And afterward. There's still a bit of discoloration where the rust was, but overall, it looks as good as new.
Here's the whole group before cleaning. Some were worse than others.
But they all cleaned up nicely.
This one had a bunch of rust on the inside as well as the outside.
I was able to clean the rust off with the brush wheel. The metal is pitted and discolored where the rust was, but it should still work fine.
