My little adventure in metal etching to make my own hinges and the weather vane for the chicken coop.

There are a lot of great tutorials for metal etching and this is just a little outline of my journey through the process.

I started with the easiest process that I found.  Etching with ferric chloride.   I set up a little pill bottle to hold the solution that will be used and made a small piece of foam board miss the paper covering to fit inside.    This will help the metal float on top of the etching solution.

Steel wool the surface of the brass sheet to remove the protective top layer.

I cut out my templates from electrical tape.  Here’s the template if you are wanting to give it a go too.  The one inch square is for size reference.

Once I had all the little shapes ready to go,  I wiped the surface of the brass with alcohol to be sure to remove any oils from the metal.   I covered the back of the metal with  electrical tape to contain the etching process to happen on one side only.

I placed all the vinyl cut outs on the metal and used double sided tape to attach the metal to the foam board float.    Every where the black is, will be not etched.  All exposed metal will be etched.

Place metal side down into the solution.  Make sure you wear gloves to prevent stains on your hands and protect all your surfaces.

Depending on your solution, time will vary.  I starting checking at the half hour mark and then less time intervals each time I checked, as the process got closer to being completed.

Here you can see the process is starting to etch the brass away.

 

More etched

Almost done.

closer still

Here the vinyl was sliding off the rooster, so I am forced to stop the process.  I was close anyway.   Rinse in a water bath to stop the etching process.

 

Here they are all cleaned off and ready to be used .    Next on my to try list is etching using the film resist.  Hope you all gleaned something new or just a nudge to try it yourself  from the post.  Have a great day.