Knowing I’ve been working on sprucing up my backyard, our managing editor Shawn Connally kindly gave me her old copper fire pit. Sweet! She also shared with me some great cleaning knowledge she had gleaned from Michael DeJong’s awesome book Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing. Turns out that to remove rust patina or firescale from copper, all you need are lemons and salt! Here’s the fire pit, in it’s blackened state, wet down:
Here are our materials (with the lemons cut in half):
Simply sprinkle salt on the wet metal:
And scrub furiously with the lemon halves (hooray for friends!):
The fun part is that you get to see results almost instantly:
The lemons pick up the rust patina/firescale and get yucky:
And the copper shines through!
Rinse and repeat until satisfied! It was fun, smelled good, and is much better for the planet than toxic funk.
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