oldred
09-13-2020, 10:08 AM
Don't know if this has been mentioned already but Boric acid came up in another thread elsewhere and I started to mention that I also use it as an anti-scale compound but I didn't want to hijack a totally different conversation. I use, and have for a long time now, Roach-pruf from Dollar General when scaling of heated metal is going to be a problem, it leaves metal that is heated to red hot scale free after cooling or quenching. Purpose made anti-scaling compounds work really well but tend to have a very short shelf life before caking up and becoming nearly unusable while the Boric acid seems to last forever, besides it's cheap and easily found so it wouldn't matter anyway. The downside is that while the stuff works great it can sometimes be a bit hard to remove the residue in hard to access places on the part but it's just a bit of an annoyance and not a real problem. Roach-Pruf is just one brand of plain Boric acid used to kill roaches and some other crawling bugs, it kills them by sticking to them and causing dehydration rather than using poison so the stuff is as safe to use as the purpose made anti-scale compounds.