Shed Cleaning Day 2020

In March of 2020, the UT Sailing Team used an off-weekend to clean out their shed at the Austin Yacht Club. The finished product of the deep clean can be seen here on the left, but beforehand the shed was a bit of a disaster. While conducting the deep clean, a big cardboard box full of old team trophies was uncovered.

The box was exceedingly dirty and the silver trophies were all immensely tarnished. These trophies had been left and forgotten about, so the project of restoring and remembering them was taken up in March of 2021.

Box of Trophies

These trophies had been stored in a dusty and dirty old cardboard box for decades in a shed where wet and dirty items are often haphazardly thrown. Lilly Andersen, a sailor at the time, took them home and used a multi-faceted approach to cleaning them off.

The silver bowls that had wooden bases were disconnected from their bases (if they had not already broken off of them). Then, she rinsed the silver bowls to get the top layer of dirt off before undergoing the first step in their two-step cleaning process.

Each of the silver bowls were submersed into large buckets of boiling water with baking soda and aluminum foil. In this boiling bath, the silver of the trophies underwent a chemical process that helped remove their tarnish.

Large amounts of the black residue that lined the entire surface of these trophies was transferred onto the sheets of aluminum foil. After letting the trophies sit in their boiling baths for about 30 minutes, they were removed and vigorously scrubbed. This process was repeated many times for each of the five silver trophies until the bulk of the tarnish had been removed.

Next, silver polish was used to help restore the trophies to as close to their former glory as was possible. Many of the trophies still retained dents and imperfections where the silver plating had been eroded away.

Much of this damage is believed to have happened as a result of corrosive liquids being stored in and not properly cleaned out of the bowls. Namely, celebratory drinks that the team drank out of their trophies.