Cleaning the Outside of a New Keggle

I am just about done converting 2 kegs. I have the tops cut off and holes drilled. I'm just working on cleaning them up a little bit more now.

Last night I soaked them in warm PBW for ~1.5-2 hours each and went after them with a scotchbrite pad. The insides cleaned up really nice but the outside leaves a lot to be desired. I'm not looking for anything near what Bobby_M has done in the keg polishing thread, just something generally clean.

There seams to be a bunch of old glue residue stuck on the sides of both kegs all the way around. Even after the PBW soak the scotchbrite pad barely put a dent in it. Its very sticky and gross looking. Any suggestions on how to try cleaning it up? I was thinking of a few possible ideas: Paint thinner, 120 grit flap wheel (will this scratch the finish up a lot?), Goo gone, stainless steel wire wheel (expensive).

Any other ideas?

Well, half of what I did was cleaning it up and the other half was shining it up.

If you have a 4.5" grinder already, get the backup pad and a pack of the gator grit surface finishing pads (use the coarser ones). You'll have clean but not shiny kegs within about 30 minutes of work each.

GooGone will help take off the sticker residue. Once you get that off, BKF on a scotch pad with some elbow grease does wonders if you don't have the grinder Bobby mentions.

I do have the angle grinder so I give the gator pads a shot. Something tells me that once I start this I'm going to end up with shiny kegs.....

Where do you normally find BKF at? I've looked around and had a tough time locating it.

Any solvent should work on the glue.


WD-40 takes it right off

Liquidicem said:

Where do you normally find BKF at?

Click to expand...

I found some in the cleanser section of our local grocery store, next to the Comet and Ajax.

Don't be afraid to use a razor blade scraper on the stickers and glue once you hit them with some WD40 or other solvent.

BKF was in my Shoprite supermarket.

Minor update:
I found some BKF at Lowes, so that was nice.

I also found a big spray bottle of GooGone at Lowes. I used this to basically coat the outside of the kegs, let it work for a few minutes the used a scotch pad on them to get the easy stuff. Almost everything came off except for whatever was on the top 1/3 of the kegs. This was some serious waxy glue substance on both of them.

I then moved on to the gator pads. I ran into 1 problem right away with these. My cheap Harbor Freight grinder does not have a long enough arbor on it to attach both the backing pad and the cleaning pad, even with everything removed from the arbor. After a little thought and some trial and error I came up with a solution. I actually used a grinding disk as the back up. It doesn't thread onto the arbor so that left room to get the pad on as well. It actually worked alright. I just had to keep an eye on the angle and be careful going over the ridges so that the disk didn't contact the keg.

I then began the cleanup. The pads knocked off a lot of the remaining glue but also melted and spread some of it around. After working over both kegs with the medium grit gator pads I was able to give them another shot of GooGone and a scrub with the scotch pad. This has removed almost all of the glue that was spread around by the pad. I had to stop there for the night because my back was getting pretty sore from leaning over the kegs. Tonight I am going to go over both of them again but with the fine grit gator pad to clean them up a bit more and remove any left over glue residue.

It's going a bit easier than I expected but taking quite a bit of time.

Need pics of the finished product!

Liquidicem said:

I ran into 1 problem right away with these. My cheap Harbor Freight grinder does not have a long enough arbor on it to attach both the backing pad and the cleaning pad, even with everything removed from the arbor.

Click to expand...

I had the same problem at first with my backing pad. The backing pad is supposed to come with a longer nut to attach to the arbor, but the first one I bought had that missing.

Mine had the nut but it still wasn't long enough.

Pictures will follow when I'm done

Wish I caught this earlier - zylene/zylol is a strong thinner that we use at work all the time for cleaning off industrial adhesives. Put on some splash gloves, outside, and soak an old t-shirt ripped to rags and coat on wet a few times and let soak. The chemical will eat up the adhesive and eventually (5-10 min) it will just wipe up. Repeat with a fresh rag to remove any residue and voila - clean outside of keg.

It is much stronger than goo-gone which is a light duty solvent.