Oxalic acid and...aluminum.
It's a late night, and I got to thinking about oxalic acid. (Fill this area with your choice of bad jokes).
As is documented in depth here at BF, we use it to clean rust off our frames. It's fairly weak as acids go, but just how bad does it attack aluminum? More importantly, could this be a good thing in the right case?
I'm going off a faint memory right now, but I could swear that last year - after pulling some chromed steel parts I was OA'ing for my 1952 Raleigh - some trivial aluminum part fell in the bath, and I didn't discover it for an hour or so. Might have been a junked seatpost I had on my forever-cluttered workbench. At any rate, when I pulled it out, the oxidation that was on said part had been significantly altered. Enough so that I started to think: "Would this work to free some stuck seatposts?"
...and then I forgot about this for eight months or so.
So, as I'm always interested in potentially less-hazardous (lye) and less painful (do the twist) ways to get stuck seatposts to start spinning, and since I've thankfully freed myself of any frames meeting that description at the moment - has anyone tried pouring an OA bath down the seattube of an inverted, stuck-post frame before? How bad was the post stuck, and what happened?
-Kurt
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