Gallery, Projects and General > How to's
Anodising Aluminium - my setup that seems to have worked.
raynerd:
Thanks guys, you only want to be supplying 12V but letting it draw what it wants upto 4A. I put a multimeter accross it yesterday and at 12V it was drawing about 3.2A.
Sulphuric acid is car battery acid. It is very hard to get hold of as it has many unpleasant uses and I don`t think you can even get it for batteries, it is only sold IN batteries. Can`t help you there - I`m lucky as I work with the stuff most days. It is only 1.5M and if you did it for longer I bet you could get away with 1M so your not looking for a concentrated solution which would be dangerous.
Rob.Wilson - Darren started a thread on making a variable power supply. You don`t actually need a variable one for this use. I believe you can convert a power supply to variable.
raynerd:
lol, you know you`ve "made it" when you get published in the "how to" forum :ddb:
andyf:
--- Quote ---Tinkerer asked: Where did you get the acid?
--- End quote ---
When I did a bit of anodising, I couldn't find any local source of H2SO4 - the car battery places I tried said they didn't carry it nowadays, because batteries are "sealed for life". But one of them kindly gave me a couple of dead batteries taken out of cars. I drained out the acid (with great care, and wear eye protection, just in case) and diluted it down by adding it to the same volume of water (add acid to water, not the other way round). Though impurities were doubtless present, it worked fine for my anodising, using a battery charger. A good battery connected in parallel with the charger to act as a smoothing capacitor may help; I didn't try it. For bigger parts, more current can be helpful. I have sometimes used a 20amp 0 - 30V variable dc power supply, so I could crank up the voltage and hence the amps.
One tip - before anodising, dip the aluminium into a strongish solution of caustic soda (aka lye, aka sodium hydroxide) for 30 seconds. It will fizz merrily, producing a nice satin surface ready for anodising, and will also remove greasy fingerprints. Rinse, then anodise. The caustic soda doesn't appreciably reduce the size of the part.
I tried dyeing, but couldn't get results nearly as good as Craynerd's - nice job :thumbup:.
Andy
dsquire:
Chris
Very nice set up. This shows that it can be done at home for small items rather simply. I'll bet we start to see a lot more small anodized items show up from a lot of different shops now. Thanks for showing us this Chris. :ddb: :ddb: :mmr:
Cheers :beer:
Don
Bernd:
I posted this sometime ago.
http://madmodder.net/index.php?topic=1529.0
Bernd
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