Electro-etching with Press-n-Peel PCB transfer film...

I've been playing around with some electro-plating / electro-etching lately, and although my plating has been less than awesome in some cases, I'm currently very pleased with my etching results.


I had previously read this thead:

sbgswordforum.proboards.com/thre ... ching-step

From the really old proboards forum about electro-etching, and it got me interested in tying some etches. Unfortunately, I could not find a print shop that would run off my very detailed, very small batch of stencils for me.

Finally, after poking around quite a while, I came across this:

elementalforge.com/EtchingArticle200911.pdf

where-in the guy uses Press-n-Peel blue PCB transfer film + laser printer to make his own stencils. He then uses a hot-plate + clothes iron to transfer the stencil to his blade.

Anyhow, finally borrowed a hot plate from my father-in-law (one of these: www.amazon.com/Princess-312296-S ... B00305H7U8), and gave it a try. Success on the transfer! I had previously tried with just an iron, but the metal would heat-sink the heat away immediately (duh!).

I'm pretty happy with this test run. The resolution of the transfer is great. There were a few flaws, and I've learned that Sharpie Pen ink does not work well for touching them up. I'll try regular Sharpie next test.

Acetone works like magic to remove the transfer film, btw.

Oh, and I used my crappy .8 amps power supply at 9v. Positive (anode) clipped to the knife, cathode clipped to the Q-Tips. Used some salt in water as the etchant.

Image editing tool I used in Windows was IrFanView. It's free, and does all the re-sizing / inverting / flipping that I needed to do.

Anyhow, I'll post up some more pics this week-end. I'm hoping to try a test run on an old 1060 katana blade I've got laying around.



Thanks,
jason


Thanks,
jason