Bad Corrosion - Best Plan of Attack?

I recently purchased an "excellent condition" ARC AAA RGB from a CPF seller. Much to my chagrin - when I opened it, it had obviously experienced a very bad case of alkaline battery corrosion sometime in the past, and someone had obviously tried to clean it up. The battery button and surrounding area are still black, with just enough scratched through to provide contact with the battery. The entire bottom half of the body (interior) is now missing the chemkote and is lightly scratched from the cleanup effort. I never realized that there was such a wide range of "excellent". Not surprisingly, the seller has not responded to my message. Anyway - the outside IS excellent, and the light functions perfectly. What would y'all do? Is it possible to cleanup and restore the interior, as well as reapply chemkote? Is it worth the effort?

I have the same problem with my old ArcAAA....I cleaned mine with a dremel, but its seems that I have not done a good job as the light work intermittently.

I be interested if a fellow CPFer could show us some light

Couldn't you get a new Arc AAA body? That'd take care of the body problem.

As for the corrosion on the head, I'd try to first buff it out.

icecube said:

Couldn't you get a new Arc AAA body? That'd take care of the body problem.

As for the corrosion on the head, I'd try to first buff it out.

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Know where to find some at a resonable price?

(not that inflated price in the b/s/t forum, iirc there's one guy who has a bunch of them and sells them there).

you could call Peter (gransee) and order one from him, I just purchased one from him with my order of two ARC AAA-P for gifts to my kids god parents.

doug

I have quite a few extra ARC AAA bodies. That's not the issue. The issue is that this is a rare collectible, and the body markings are not the same as most of the other ARC bodies. This version has the lettering on the side of the body.

OH - there is the other issue of the individual who misrepresented the condition of the light when he sold it. Hardly an "honest mistake" - especially when you consider that:

1) He never responded to my messsage about the condition of the light.
2) He quickly deleted the Buy/Sell/Trade Post from the forum once he got paid and shipped the light.

Not much I can do about that except send it back and cancel the Paypal. Before I do that, I want to see if I can get the corrosion fixed. I've emailed ARC, and hopefully they can fix the problem for a reasonable fee.

randyo said:

He quickly deleted the Buy/Sell/Trade Post from the forum once he got paid and shipped the light.

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Unless you bought more than one of these, I found the sale by searching the threads you've posted in. You should raise this in Cheers-n-Jeers so others will beware.

peace

I guess the search function has some subleties that I was no aware of. Just doing a search on the sellers username did not turn it up. However, searching on mine did. Doing an advanced search on posts started by the seller finds the post also. ???

If you wanted, you could have Peter engrave the proper markings for you...

Of course, I'd be prepared lighten my wallet a little. But I'll leave that between you and him...

The way I see it, although I don't understand the reactive properties of the ChemKote, once it gets corroded it's toast. Yes you could have the original body for sentimental value, but is it really worth it? It's like if you buy an excessively lowered E30 M3, lowered enough that they had to grind out the fenders to clear P245/40R17s. (At least I think the M3 could fit 17s).

Essentially, if you'd want to fix it all back up and put stock 15s on (essentially in your case, getting a new body with the proper engravings) you'd need to fix up the fender damage, as rust could be a serious problem.

But, moving on past the metaphor, I believe that you could drill all the corrosion out and have Peter or somebody re-ChemKote it. But you'd have to experiment to get all of the corrosion out, as you wouldn't want corrosion under the coating. And I believe in order to do that you'd be skimming a small amount of (the rather thin) body material out, possibly compromising the integrity and strength of the body.

Of course, I could be wrong about all this, but it's my thinking at bay. Peter should be able to chime in and explain it all.