Stage Screws

The stage is full of rusted and stripped screws. I managed to get many of them off with a normal screw driver and some of the tougher ones came loose with pliers. There were still several that wouldn't budge so I bought a drill (Black & Decker DR340B) and a screw extractor bit (#1), which has been working pretty great.

I'm starting with the left pad and I've removed nearly all of the stainless steel for cleaning. It seems that putting the stainless steel in the dishwasher gets it pretty clean. I set it to pots and pans. It doesn't get rid of any rust, but the dirt and grime comes off without needing to manually scrub it. For any remaining sticky residue, I use Goo Gone. For the rust, I'll probably try CLR although I've never used it before so I'm not sure yet.

Before dishwasher:

After dishwasher:

I'm also using a shop vac to grab this mess:

I'm disassembling the pad entirely and it's taking a lot of time. Surprisingly, there are very few screws missing on the L-brackets, but nearly every screw is rusted or in otherwise terrible shape so I'm ordering replacements.

Also, I managed to break the head off one of the screws holding an L-bracket. Luckily, a small bit of thread was over the metal so I was able to get it out with pliers. There were also two screws on the top of the pad that the screw extractor failed to grab, leaving circular, hollow heads. I took a hack saw and cut a slot into heads of the screws for a flt-head screwdriver, but twisting just chipped off more metal. One of them slowly made it out but the other nearly disintegrated. With a lot of patience I managed to finally get it out with some pliers and WD-40. I definitely need to replace all of the surface screws.