Rust Never Sleeps, or does it?

When I treated my brake and clutch pedals I followed the directions closely. First, I brushed off all of the loose rust with a wire wheel in my drill, then the wiped them down with some diluted Simple Green.

Here are close ups of the two pedals before applying Corroseal.

And here they are after one coat of Corroseal before I painted them.

With the pedals fitted in the new support bracket I noticed the brake pedal stop (the part with the rectangular hole) was hitting the bolt for the clutch pedal stop. Somebody had bent it over so it wouldn't rub on the side of the old bracket, which it was sure to do with the crooked shaft.

I was curious about how the rust conversion would work with little to no surface prep and I had the perfect test piece, my old pedal support.

On the clutch side, with the elongated hole, I spent a couple of minutes with a wire brush and then wiped off the "rust dust."

On the the brake side I left all 50 years of patina in place.

The application of the rust converter was a little more difficult since the surface wasn't nearly as smooth as it could have been had I used the wire wheel. I also noted that the cup I was using to dip my brush was becoming contaminated much more quickly. After one coat here are the results.

Not bad for maybe 10 minutes of effort, but still not acceptable. Some of the rusty areas were fully neutralized but a lot of rust still showed. So I applied a second coat which went on very easy and only took a few minutes.

Now we're talking! To really put this rust converter to the test, I'll top coat half of it with spray paint and then leave it outside for a while and see what happens. Stay tuned...

Clutch Support

Déjà vu. This is the clutch pedal shaft where it go through the support bracket. My previous Mustang back in 1980 suffered from the same problem as Ford used an inexpensive pot-metal bushing with a plastic liner that just wasn't up to the task. Once the bushing fails the shaft starts grinding away as the bracket, even cutting a groove in the shaft.

With the shaft being so crooked, the pedal is also crooked making the linkage bind. Since the brake pedal shares the same shaft it has the same problems.

Here are the clutch and brake pedals after I did a quick brushing with the wire wheel to remove any loose rust, then wiped them down. I then applied Corroseal Rust Converting Primer.

It's water based and goes on with a brush. It kind of looks like watered down Elmer's Glue. In just a few minutes the magic starts to happen.

Any surface rust gets converted to magnetite which protects the metal and keeps it from rusting any further. After they dried I sprayed the two pedals with black trim paint.

Here's a closeup of the new pedal support showing the problematic bushing. I'm not trusting this one bit so I picked up an improved bushing set that uses actual needle bearings.

I first had to remove the stock bushing using my Dremel to grind off the 10 little tabs.

A few good whacks with my hammer and the bushing fell right out. Here's the new bearing next to the old bushing.

And finally, two shots of the finished pedal assembly.