Diesel fuel is what I’ve used in the past for soaking parts needing to be broken free and for locked up engines, but it won’t really remove rust. For the tracks, I know that simply running them would have cleaned them up over time once the pins and links were freely moving but I worried about being able to get them loose enough to install and then freely moving without risk of breaking track pins which are getting hard to source and a bit expensive.
My tracks were pretty stuck having been stored in rolls for an unknown amount of time outside. After forcing them flat with the breaker bar and getting pins cut so I’d have tracks in smaller sections, some were still so stiff that you could hold it up at each end and it wouldn’t sag whatsoever in the center. Most could be stood up on end like boards so you know that there would have been no easy way to attempt installing them to run them until free.
The people that dipped the hull were willing to do the tracks when they did the other work since it was still part of the project they were doing as a test. They ended up soaking them over a three day extended weekend initially. Then took them out and washed them down so that the links could be worked back and forth by hand. Then soaked them again the next weekend so the chemicals could really get inside where the pins might have been sticking after that first bath. What I got back were tracks that a little kid could easily roll up by hand.
I didn’t expect to be ready to install the tracks for a year or more so decided to leave them in sections for easier handling. I used a spray grease to coat the outer surface since the shed they would be inside wasn’t sealed from the elements and I didn’t want the tracks locking up again if they ended up being stored a lot longer than I planned.
When I was ready to put the tracks together, I took the sections to a local car wash (at night after hours) that had a high pressure wand with soapy hot water. Blasted everything clean of grease since I knew the tracks needed to be used without lubricant as it would attract dirt and sand which is abrasive to the pins and link sockets. Used my torch to heat up pin ends and made my own rivet domes as I put the sections back together so they would look like an original factory track.
After that the installation was simple, even for a novice like myself.
