I did a little math on this method and although I have never tried it, it might be useful. Stainless steel has a resistivity of about ten time that of copper. The head of a screw is probably about 1/2 a square. The copper wire you would use to hook up to the screw might be 1000 squares (1/4 inch wire 6 feet long) or 200 times the resistance of the stainless. Likely, it will be the copper wire that heats up in your experiment, not the stainless. On the other hand, the aluminum oxide might be high resistance and it might actually be that you are trying to heat. But heating the stainless is unlikely with this setup. In my opinion, you are more likely to weld something together with a high current source than you are likely to free it up. My advice is don't try this without talking to someone who has done it and found it to work, which is what you are doing anyway.
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