pasadena_commut
Well-Known Member
Our house was built in the late 50s. The original tub is still in place and I believe it is porcelain enamel on steel. Some previous owner had put down antiskid strips. Later those were pried up but they made permanent marks on the surface. So the tub was coated with some sort of plastic. When we bought the house we had the interior painted before we moved in, and the painter apparently washed brushes and and such in the tub. So shortly after we moved in the the surface started coming up. I removed all of the coating in the tub using "3M Safer Stripper" (at least I think that was the name, this was 27 years ago!) This revealed the strip marks, but they were not all that bad, and a scrub with bar keeper's friend removed most of that. We never recoated the tub since the ghost of the strip marks was not something we worried about.
The surface is pretty smooth. If they etched the porcelain before putting on the plastic it wasn't enough to make the surface feel rough. Unfortunately it very rapidly gets coated in hard water deposits, which is no surprise given how hard our water is. I'm wondering if there might be some way to polish it slightly, to give it a slightly smoother finish, so that the soap and calcium don't have quite so many microscopic features to stick to. On the other hand, since the surface might already have been somewhat damaged by an etch (hypothetically), I definitely don't want to make things worse. Is there a reasonable way to proceed, or just keep living with it? Note I really don't want to make it as slick as some tubs can be, since falling in the tub is not high on the list of ways I would like to exit this existence!
We are not currently considering putting in soft water to fix the calcium problem. Maybe when we repipe the house (hopefully not soon). For now I suspect the only thing keeping the original galvanized from fully rusting out is the higher pH of the hard water.
Thanks
The surface is pretty smooth. If they etched the porcelain before putting on the plastic it wasn't enough to make the surface feel rough. Unfortunately it very rapidly gets coated in hard water deposits, which is no surprise given how hard our water is. I'm wondering if there might be some way to polish it slightly, to give it a slightly smoother finish, so that the soap and calcium don't have quite so many microscopic features to stick to. On the other hand, since the surface might already have been somewhat damaged by an etch (hypothetically), I definitely don't want to make things worse. Is there a reasonable way to proceed, or just keep living with it? Note I really don't want to make it as slick as some tubs can be, since falling in the tub is not high on the list of ways I would like to exit this existence!
We are not currently considering putting in soft water to fix the calcium problem. Maybe when we repipe the house (hopefully not soon). For now I suspect the only thing keeping the original galvanized from fully rusting out is the higher pH of the hard water.
Thanks
