Hi all, Made a good progress on this beast. I took some of the ideas here and here is the result.
I used the razor blade method to remove the surface rust. Didn't ever try this before but this portion for cleaning worked. The machined surface was harder than the blade and the blistered oxidized surface was softer. Scrapped it until no resistance was felt and sounded smoother.
Than I made up paper towels folded to about 1 3/4 wide soaked them in 5% white vinegar and held them on the surface with magnets. The vinegar/towel patch stayed on for 2 hours and turned the surface black. Next treatment was a steel wool and WD40 scrub which cleaned up the surface to a dull steel color.
Final was a WD40 wet sand with first 320 grit and followed up with 600. Came out good but the pock marks which are very minor still are slightly darker than the rest of the surface. Followed with a light coat of sewing machine oil.
When I first tried to rotate the door it never did, After the razor blade it rotated about an inch, after the polishing it finally rotated to the fully closed position.
The other process was to separate the door from the hinge (250# +/-) to clean the old 84 year old grease and give it a fresh lube. The tolerances are so tight that when I used regular chaulk to check for any rub points the chaulk actually filled the gap enough that I needed to really put some pressure on the handle to rotate back open.
I decided to keep the patina finish on the exterior and gloss white the interior as it was so dark in the original dark green color.
I still need to paint the lug area of the door silver and refurbish the combination lock.
Thank you all for the suggestions.
Sawyer
