Sunday 6 February 2011

Etching the Brake Pedal

Spent the morning in Newark mooching about - and felt a bit guilty about not having got anything done on the bike.
Been speaking with Smithgrind as I think he's gonna have a crack at etching. That got me thinking about the forward controls for the bike. I made a brake pedal up with toddy a while back, which has been sitting tucked behind the curtain in the front room. I decided it was time to have a crack at etching it up, having learned from my experiments prior to this...

Normal process, Made up the stencil on the computer and printed it on press'n'peel paper stuff:-



Stuck it in place on the pedal (cleaned / and good quality finish etc...). I had some grief with ironing it on due to the curve of the pedal - never fear - baby blowtorch to the rescue to heat it from the back, the finished it off and smoothed it all down with the iron...



cooled it right down, and peeled it off.

I wasn't a great stencil - but the main outlines were all there



plenty of masking tape  all around to cover the exposed areas:-



touched up all the areas left with some 1shot enamel



then it was off to the shed. My power pack is pretty fubared - so i used a new car battery charger I got recently. for the etching solution instead of the salt solution I used the ferric chloride I had put in a jar from my first try (I remembered that it was dead fast before)

in an ice cream tub with some thin copper pipe as an electrode:-


ferric chloride in, positive to the peice of work, negative to the copper and away to go!








Not sure how long to leave it I checked it after 6 mins:-



this stuff is working pretty damn fast!

being greedy with it and wanting a deeper etch I left it in for another 14 mins (20 mins in total). I was worried when i saw this come out:-



balls - looks like I left it too long and it had blown through the resist - OR DID IT?Huh??




Stripped the tape off and cleaned it up with nitromores, then a wash and tickle with scotch-pad under the sink and we have lift off!!!!!




VERY VERY VERY happy with that! the little bits and bobs actually look class around it!

2 comments:

  1. Bitchin' Almost looks like a cast piece.

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  2. That is a really cool idea……By the way did ou study industrial design or something?

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