That Rusty Junk in Your Barn? The Amish Know It's Worth a FORTUNE (Don't Scrap It)

My name is Isaac Miller. I am Amish, I have run a forge in Lancaster County for thirty-some years, and a good part of my living is telling English folks what their old iron is worth. You clean out the barn, see rust, and figure it is rot. So the picker takes the whole corner for fifty dollars. You did the hard work of hauling it out and still came away with almost nothing. Rust on a solid old tool is a coat, not a cancer. It sits a few thousandths of an inch deep, and under it the steel is usually sound. That skin and the stamp beneath it are where the money lives. Hay Budden anvils sold new for about ten cents a pound. A clean one brings three to five dollars a pound today, because nobody makes them like that anymore. The fix is maybe twenty-five dollars. You brush the stamp with a four-dollar brass brush, rub white chalk across it, and rake a flashlight almost flat over it to wake the mark. Then you give it a citric acid soak and paste wax. A 130-pound anvil is thirteen dollars of scrap. Looked up and listed, it is four hundred fifty. In this video I show you how to sort treasure from trash, how to wake a maker's mark with chalk and a flashlight, the citric acid soak and wax finish, a homemade oil for seized tools, why iron stays off concrete, and what may be sitting on your barn roof. I also tell you where it falls short. Deep pitting in a cutting edge, cracked cast iron and a saw blade gone thin as paper are past saving. WHAT YOU WILL NEED Brass-bristle brush, $4 Plain white chalk and a flashlight Citric acid, one-pound bag, $9 Paste wax, $8 Acetone and automatic transmission fluid, half and half, about $10 A dust mask A WORD OF CAUTION Never leave a tool in citric acid past a day, or it strips original paint and japanning with the rust. If a piece is rare, do not clean it at all, because collectors pay more for untouched. Never force a seized tool with a cheater bar. A cracked casting is worth nothing. Wear a dust mask when you brush rust. Subscribe, and next time I will show you how to put a working edge back on those old chisels with a flat stone. #amish #blacksmith #oldtools #antiquetools #barnfinds #toolrestoration #rustremoval #anvil