Stainless Steel Sink Renewal
Kung Fu Maintenance shows you how to make a tired stainless steel kitchen sink look like new again.
I have been wanting to make this video for a while.
There’s any number of cleaners that you can use, but the real key is the green scrubber pad. These types of cleaners, you never want to use this on a fiberglass tub or on porcelain because this has little bits of metal in it, and it actually kind of sands stuff. So you don’t want to use this on anything that it would scratch, leave a bunch of scratches on. You can use just regular dish soap or any other cleaner. You do want to follow it up when you’re finished with some type of stainless steel polish. There’s any number of brands out there, a satin finish or whatever. That’ll make a big difference.
Anyway, one of the most common cleaners, I guess, starts with a four and ends with a nine. You spray it on like this.
So I’m just going to spray it down real good and let it sit for a second. And I’m going to go ahead and put some gloves on. And we can see it’s pretty knarly stained there. Let’s see how this works out. Got my gloves on. Now to use it, it’s just like sandpaper and sand it. And this is called regraining.
Up here a little bit, You can see all these calcium deposits around the air jet of the disposer, dishwasher drain line. So we’re going to just sand all of these off, too.
It doesn’t take a whole lot of pressure, on the sponge just moderate pressure. I’m not going to do this yet because I want to show you the difference between when you do it. So I haven’t sanded the drain yet. So sand around by the faucet– all those gnarly areas. Let’s take a peek down there. See all that in there.
And once you get up all the areas sanded– yeah, I didn’t sand in the drain yet– I just wanted to show you the difference. Maybe at the end of this video I can show a complete before and after photo because I forgot to take a photo of it before, but I guess I can grab a still frame from the video. And it might take you a couple of runs, but it’s worth it if it makes you– it’s beginning to look like new.
I didn’t do the drain yet. I can show you get a good shot of the drain here. And now I’ll go ahead and do it. Now you can see around the ridges, on the inside, all that brown gunk. So you can go ahead and spray it with your chemical, and then take your green scrubber sponge and use moderate pressure. It doesn’t have to be super, super hard, but just hard enough. And just sand it all the way around it.
There. And now I wil go ahead and rinse it out. And you can probably see an improvement already. And rinse the rest of the sink.
There’s a bit of a buildup here and rinse that off. Here now we can use our sponge to clean it all off and move it all down. And it’s in here that we find and can get rid of.
We’ve just removed all the calcium buildup. I can see a lot underneath the faucet, also. And this will work for that also. It may be easier to get in there and come back later with a toothbrush or with a wire brush, but I’m going to do it a little bit, do what I can. Make that at least a little bit better.
It makes it a little more manageable. It’s probably not going to be perfect, but anyway. At least it won’t look quite as bad. You’ve got to pick your battles sometimes, do what you can do. And maybe little by little descale it out, spend some more time, make that better.
I’m going to go grab my rag, but you can already see the whole thing is looking quite a bit better. Still has that white residue here. Got that calcium deposit. I had professional cleaners come in and clean this already. And that’s how dirty it was after they cleaned it. Not everybody knows this trick. Now that you’re watching this video, you’ll know this trick which is pretty simple. It’s hard to even call it a trick, but hey, it is what it is. You can show a difference between start and finish. Yeah, it is what it is.
And it really is about the details. There’s always room for the top of this here.
I’m going to go grab my rag and let this down, and then I’ll show you the polish portion. I think we’re pretty good there. Use my rag, and I wipe all the cleaning chemical out. I really don’t want to mix chemicals here. And if there’s anything else that shows up– maybe we should get that while we’re here, too, and see a little bit of calcium deposits here. It takes what it takes. A junky job. Might be only a few minutes, but a good job might take you 30 minutes, but still we’re going to make the difference. You can see all the buildup there? Sand it out again.
Work it out down the middle, a little sanding-like motion. I usually like to sand it in advance, back and forth. Those spots might call for a little circular motion. Whatever it takes, right? I need to get it up here. That looks a lot better. Up here you can probably see some smaller stuff sticking.
I’ll just make it a little bit better. So also around this area, I can still use a little bit of detailing. And a tiny bit there.
This part, around the dishwasher, the air gap. You can tell where this has backed up before. It’s all clear now, but you can definitely tell the water is coming out of there on a regular basis which indicates that the drain line from the dishwasher drain line to the area, the air gap to the disposal. That line from the air gap to the disposal has been clogged before because when you see water spit out of here, that’s what that indicates.
That’s some stubborn stains back there. Even this is having a hard time with it. So I’m going to let that part of it sit for a little bit. Spray a little chemical in there.
It’s pretty darn stubborn there. That seems that we’re getting it. Anyway, this is what you call re-graining the kitchen sink or a stainless steel sink. It works on anything that’s made of stainless steel that’s thick enough to take the pressure of you pushing this on it. That’s a bit better. It’s not perfect, but enough for you to understand the difference.
So now what you want to do is take a fresh towel, and you want to go ahead and spray your stainless steel polish on. Firstly, Always read the manufacturer recommendations for the particular one that you’re using. Most of them you just spray it on, let it sit for a little while, and then wipe if off. Most of them smell pretty good, too. And when you wipe it off, you want to wipe it off with a dry cloth. Just makes it more satin, more polished. It definitely works a lot better if you re-grain it first like we did.
So we’ll let it sit for a little bit. Grab your dry rag. If it’s sitting even for a bit, it starts to dry a little bit. These particular directions tell us to shake the can well, polish surface to a bright, spotless shine with a clean, dry cloth or towel. If you’re using this in the food processing area, you’ve got to make sure that you can’t smell anything before you use it. That’s a little scary. You don’t want to get this on floors or they can get slippery. And the product contains silicone. So it has a lubricating quality, kind of like what silicone spray does. And we can go ahead and start to wipe this off. See how it starts to come out.
Get our faucet, also. Polish does more than just make it look good for now. It also coats it with a finish that helps the water to run off. Definetly a good thing.
So then, back on the rag. Dry it off here. Yeah, the details do make a difference there. Down inside our drain here. I have to rub this out, polish this out.
See if there’s any other areas that need our attention. It looks like right here could use a little bit more of re-graining. There you go.
Wipe if off with our cleaning rag and spray it with our polish. Rub that out. Looks like one more little bit in there right here.
And there we go. One regrained and polished stainless steel sink. This one happens to to be a kitchen sink.