List your favorite/untraditional cleaning/restoration tips ...

[jacob]

* Surface rust is very easily removed by scrubbing it with a piece of crumbled up aluminum foil and any kind of lubricant (cooking oil, wd40, ...)
* For wooden handles, I like to sand them down and then apply a layer or two of "Danish Oil" (tung or linseed oil)

[KevinW]

Soaking in plain tap water for long periods works surprisingly well. I've cleaned up some real doozies of caked-on messes by soaking 1 day, scraping off a loose layer of gunk, and repeating for a few days.

+1 to Goo Gone for glue residue, labels, and other gummy messes.

Coca Cola works as a rust remover. Being an acid, though, I imagine it takes a lot of material with it too.

[jacob]

Coca Cola works as a rust remover. Being an acid, though, I imagine it takes a lot of material with it too.

If you shake the bubbles out, the carbonic acid buffer balance is removed and the pH drops to 2.4 or so due to the phosphoric acid. Same acting agent as naval jelly, another good rust remover. I wonder whether the bubbles act to increase the reaction speed. Otherwise it would be more effective to use flat cola.

[JL13]

I tried to buy some naval jelly at the hardware store the other day. The clerk wouldn't sell it to me because he thought it was too toxic and gave me some steel wool instead. It didn't work. :/

[Riggerjack]

The clerk wouldn't sell it to me because he thought it was too toxic

The clerk wouldn't sell it to you... Because you weren't naval jelly licensed?

What hardware store do you shop in that has clerks empowered to demand "your papers!", and why would you shop there?

[JL13]

Well he said "you don't want to buy that let me show you what to do." I'm quite sure I was free to purchase it if I had insisted.

[henrik]

Vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser of the washing machine will get out smells and brighten whites.

How much vinegar? Do you know of any clothing materials that don't work well with vinegar in the washing cycle?
The main reason I'm asking is that vinegar should also work well against limescale buildup in the machine, but I somehow have a moral problem running the machine empty just to clean it:)

[jennypenny]

I think you're supposed to use 1/2 cup (125ml IIRC), but I just fill the fabric softener dispenser to the top. If you don't have one, add the vinegar to the rinse cycle.

I've used it on all of our sports clothing (tech and cotton), dress shirts, cotton, jeans, and all linens with no problems. Makes darks darker and whites whiter, and it's good at getting rid of most odors. I keep a spray bottle of vinegar in the laundry room and spray directly onto the underarms of shirts to get rid of deodorant gunk and keep whites from yellowing.

Make sure it's distilled white vinegar.

[Ydobon]

White vinegar is now our go to for general purpose cleaning, marvellous stuff, just dilute some in a cheap gardening spray bottle (think ours was £0.50) with water and away you go. Don't waste your money buying tiny bottles at inflated prices, we bulk order 20l at a time from a Chinese supermarket. It's not like it can go bad!

Agree with GandK on microfibre cloths, pennies each when bought in quantity and very handy.

[tsch]

Toothpaste can be a useful soft polisher. Used to use it on my timex watch face. Just used it to remove the very last bits of residue of a label on a plastic container I wanted to keep.