I swear I saw some posts in this thread about chemicals that can be used to remove rust from parts but perhaps it was in another thread. Anyway, I had been meaning to post that if you don't have or can't find any of those chemicals, anything with a lot of citric acid in it, like orange juice, will quickly strip the surface rust off steel parts. My dad showed me this trick for cleaning up some small parts on an old car I was working on. Citric acid is also used as an enviromentally friendly chemical for passivation by companies like the one I work for. Passivation uses chemicals to remove the steel residue left on parts from the machining process so that they do not exhibit surface rust even though the base material is not rusting.