Etching aluminum

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Larry42

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I want to make some aluminum ID tags for a project. Did my usual YouTube searches. Found one that sounded simple and gave it a try this week end. NaOH (Drano.)
It etched to .016" deep in about 12 hours. It came out very smooth. I mixed a fairly concentrated 1/2 pint of water and the NaOH. A paper printed with laser toner works as a resist.
 
Did you iron on the resist? I've heard it works well for PC boards but haven't tried it
 
Not sure what you are "etching" however I got great results using an old pc power supply and some salt water to etch some serial numbers into some aluminum parts. I was able to control the dept and used some nail polish as a masking template that produced very cleanly defined edges and this happened relatively quickly within minutes.
 
Ten-thousandths deep is a pretty respectable depth for 12 hours, I'm going to have to try it out. Not that I need anything right now, but you never know. I'm curious about the resist / transfer method as well.

-frank
 
My tone was running low so the toner resist try didn't work the best. But the bare back side came out very smooth.
 
I used to do toner transfer but finally broke down and bought photo-resist dry film (Dupont Dynamask). It works SO much better than the toner transfer. It used to be impossible to find, but is all over Ebay and Amazon now.
 
Larry42 said:
I want to make some aluminum ID tags for a project. Did my usual YouTube searches. Found one that sounded simple and gave it a try this week end. NaOH (Drano.)
It etched to .016" deep in about 12 hours. It came out very smooth. I mixed a fairly concentrated 1/2 pint of water and the NaOH. A paper printed with laser toner works as a resist.
Click to expand...

I would love to see some pictures of your results!
 
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