Current Mood: Surprised

I found a pretty cool retro kitchen table at a rummage sale for $10. It’s Formica and chrome, totally 50′s. A friend of mine gave me some sweet 50′s teal chairs a while back, so I thought that it would be a great match! However, the chrome legs on the table were pretty funky, all dinged and rusted. So Sarah told me to scrub them down with Coca Cola and aluminum foil. What?! So I had to research it for myself, and found it to be true: Coca Cola poured on aluminum foil (shiny side), then used like a scrubbing pad, removes surface rust on chrome. The article I found said to scrub then dry with a towel. Apparently the article writer didn’t have anything very large to scrub; these table legs were not going to get by with just a toweling. So I rinsed them really well and dried them. And you know what? It worked pretty well! It’s not going to fix the pits and dings in the chrome, so it’s not like I got bright, shiny new table legs, but they do look a lot better! Check what the Mythbusters found.

Word of caution: Do this in a sink, outside, or somewhere that a mess is okay. Because messy it is. Whatever chemical reaction happens with the rust and the Coke and the aluminum creates a nasty black mess. And your aluminum will shred. Take a peek at my results (the leg on the left was cleaned, versus one not cleaned yet):