On the subject of molasses, I stripped all the rust from my BSA bits 20+ years ago. It was an English bike imported by me, and had seen its share of salt roads over the years.
Scrape and wire brush any oysters off, make sure there is only light surface rust remaining and then immerse completely for about 3 weeks. I would pull it out occasionally to check progress, and rub any bits which were a bit slower cleaning up than the others.
It would eventually come out spotlessly free of rust, but would go brown under your eyes in seconds. Very necessary then to passivate it quickly - under the tap, then wipe over with a weak alkaline solution, then light sand dry and undercoat ASAP.
My mixture was 10% molasses, 90% water. I had a large 135 litre plastic tub which would drown the mudguards (fenders), and about every two weeks had to scrape off a 1" layer of mould. The mould did not affect the bath performance. A 20 litre drum of molasses goes a long way.
The Molasses solution is a little acidic, about the same as lemon juice.
The mudguards emerged with a definite lacey see-through look
about them requiring quite a bit of patching, welding etc, and lots of finishing time, but I was able to retain the original parts.
The mixture does not attack the parent metal, and that is the beauty of using Molasses.
Colin