Restoring Boley staking set

I’ve recently purchased a staking set manufactured by Boley.

The set has not been used for a while and was partially covered in rust. The holes and threads had traces of old dried out lubricants; the lever attaching the body to the base has rusted in place.

Most of the punches were eaten by rust as well, in some cases the tips were completely destroyed by oxidation. Center punch was somewhat deformed—most probably it was misused at some point.

In this article I’ll walk you through the process of restoration.

Disassembly

In order to clean up all the parts I had to disassemble the set first.

One issue I encountered straight away is rusted base lever; in order to free it I had to use some penetrating oil and leave it there overnight.

Another issue was bottom bushing that rusted in place. In order to softly push it out I machined a plastic part on a lathe with a M6-threaded hole in it. The part allowed me to push the bushing out without leaving any scratches on the main body:

About Evapo-Rust

I decided to use Evapo-Rust as an anti-rust solution. You should have the surfaces cleaned up and then submerge the parts into an Evapo-Rust bath and keep it there for a while (depending on the rust levels it can be 8-48 hours or more). The process can be sped up by heating up the solution or by using it with an ultrasonic cleaner.

The solution is claimed to be save for skin and eye of the user; it also shouldn’t destroy the paint layer of the part (aspect that concerned me a lot during this project).

Evaporation is a key part of the process (well, isn’t it obvious from the product name?). You can learn about the product in more details by checking out the official website: https://www.evapo-rust.com.

Evapo-Rust is highly regarded by many tool restorers and other specialists, for example Adam Savage himself recommends the product:

Removing rust

I only has one liter of Evapo-Rust to handle all the parts, so I had to clean the body and the punches/stakes separately. It took me a few days to handle everything.

I kept the parts around 24 hours in the solution, somethimes heating it up by putting in a food dehydrator (I use TurboTronic FD14 for such purposes and I find it absolutely phenomenal—and with analog controls as I prefer). For the most rusted parts I also did a 10 minutes ultrasonic cleaning session afterwards.

After wiping the parts with a dry cloth and rising in isopropyl alcohol the parts are ready for assembly.

After rust removal it became obvious that some of the punches aren’t functional anymore, I had to remove 4 punches from rotation because their tips rusted all the way through and just collapsed after being kept in the solution.

Center punch is also damaged; in the future I’m going to order Bergeon 5285-293 punch as a replacement.

Evapo-Rust didn’t affect the base paint layer of the set, but, unfortunately, Boley logo on the side of the body disappeared. I used a cheap printer and 3M Invisible tape to recreate the logo:

Assembly

Now I had to assemble and oil the set. I mostly used 3-in-1 oil, but for heavy load parts I used lithium ball bearing grease. Now everyting is working perfectly!

Assembled set review

Now that we’ve assembled the set, let me tell you about some of its most interesting features. The base can be combined with the body in order to make it tall enough to accept punches as stakes:

The base can be used as an independent open staking set, but I’m missing the plate that can be used for that. Here’s a diagram of such a usage from the manual:

Both upper and lower bushings have a spring inside; it serves to hold the punch in any set position (this prevents accidental drops of the punches on sensitive parts).

That’s it for now, I hope you enjoyed it; thank you for checking out this restoration story!