ShopBuilt - How to Anodize Aluminum!

going on YouTube so let's probably imagine ever since I started building these these flip stops I want been wanting to try anodizing in the shop instead of send them out but always a little bit afraid of the process then chuckle whatever posted it and izing video just a couple of weeks ago and it kind of broke the fear for me I went ahead and ordered all the stuff but to be honest with you I've had a lot of trouble over the last couple weeks but I think I got a pretty good process going now so I just want to give you guys a whole bunch of information on and izing and the shortest videos possible so let me see how I make out with this disclaimer before we get started I'm no professional anodizing I just started doing this couple weeks ago and I just been researching off the internet a few things to know of course this is battery acid it is diluted quite a bit but even though it's diluted you still want to wear the proper PPE another note kaswell's great reference on the internet they got a forum they got this how to anodized manual which I have been referencing like crazy that's where I bought the dyes and stuff great website definitely want to check them out alright let's get started right so the anodizing take itself is made up of a few different components you got the battery acid which is diluted down quite a bit it's one per battery acid into three parts distilled water then you have a cathode which is I'm usually a piece of lead LED flashing actually from the home center you can use aluminum but aluminum will deteriorate over time where the lead will basically last forever one note with the aluminum flashing though there is like a coating on that which has to be sanded off before you use it next is the anode now I just have aluminum bar crossing this but titanium wire is what I'm gonna hang the part on and that's what your positive charge will go to and then finally I have this little fish tank air pump and all that's doing is add some agitation and it's Hank because you could potentially get some bubbles buildup on your part and that could cause a defect and the agitation will just knock those bubbles off all right so before we get started anodized there's two things left we take into consideration one is the surface finish so how shiny the part is and to how we're going to clean it so right off the mill I got a pretty nice shiny surface but you do see mill marks in there and to remove that I just hit it with a scotch very proud of the green one and that kind of matched it down a little bit but it still gives you a fairly shiny surface so the shiny the surface is like if I go over the buffing wheel it will look more metallic when I anodized it and then the more say if I put it on the belt sander and the more rough the texture is the more matte the anodizing will look so the Scots brake pad is kind of like a happy medium and that's what I've been doing now the same before cleanliness is obviously very important but there's a simple test that you could do to make sure that you're there and I'm just going to demonstrate this really quickly this part here is a dirty part this one here I have cleaned or degreased and I'm just going to spray it with a bottle of water and notice how this one kind of bubbles up now if I do the same thing to this one see how it almost like sheets off of there that's called the water brake test and as long as your part passes this water brake test you are clean enough so with that in mind all I did to do to get this to break the water brake test is scrub it with a degree so it's just simple green degreaser so after a part has been degreased a lot of people go to the etching step and what you use for that is lye or drain open or a hundred percent lie though you mix that with some water you put your aluminum part in and it edges to surface and that will really get rid of any leftover oils but the problem with this is it also affects your surface finish so when you etch it actually eats away at the aluminum and you get takes away some of your shine so you're going to be left with a little bit more of a matte anodizing so I choose to skip that step altogether I mean if as long as you pass the water brake tests you don't need to etch the part so for me after the degreaser goes right to the anodizing tank alright so now that the parts are all clean we can talk about racking now as I was saying earlier I bought some titanium wire but that's totally not necessary aluminum TIG wire works great it's just the thing with aluminum tape wire is it's a one-time use so after you've used it in anodizing it gets anodized as well and becomes an insulator and no longer will get a good connection so you just have to keep throwing these out and use the new ones where the titanium you just keep using over and over now to rack it I kind of make this loop shape here and I stuff that in the hole now you really do have to make sure you got a good connection here because if you lose your connection or it gets anodized underneath that connection you're gonna lose your charge and it just won't work anymore so make sure it's good and tight in there see that's too loose right yeah another thing I forgot the miniature bow at the anodizing tank just sitting here by itself it doesn't emit any dangerous fumes or anything as far as I know but soon as you start the anodizing process and add power to it it does give off a hydrogen fume I guess it's not crazy bad or anything like that but you definitely want to do it a ventilated area I actually purchased some fume suppressant buy from kaswell's you just put a couple tablespoons of this and it's supposed to basically eliminate all of the fumes but just still to be on the safe side I take it up to the garage make sure the doors open I don't want to take any chances for this stuff now of course you don't want your parts to touch the cathode so you want to make sure it's nice and centered and I like to put it right over where the bubbles are going to shoot out and one thing I forgot to mention from the time you clean the part to the time that goes in the tank you do not want to touch it with your hands got to wear gloves anything or prints at all will definitely show through and your finish quick note about power supplies I picked up this guy on Amazon it was like 80 bucks or something like that it only goes up to about 5 amps but that's plenty for the parts I use and I say that because a lot of people just use battery chargers the thing is with battery chargers you really like to control because you should be setting your amperage to how much surface area your part has Caswell says for a 1/2 amps per square foot which is about point zero three amps per square inch and with that being said if you're a little bit less an amperage the parts gonna take on a lot more die but not be quite as hard or as durable anodizing surface the flipside of that if you put too many amps in it's going to give you a really hard anodized surface but it won't take that dye as well so for me dye is more important so I stay a little bit on the light side of that about point zero two amps per square inch on my parts and that seems to be giving me the best I don't know in between as far as how well it takes to die but still gives me a durable surface all right so I can go ahead and hook the negative ups to the piece of lead and the positive to my part or on the titanium wire and I already have the unit set to their proper Hambridge which mine works out to be about point three amps and time wise there's a calculator you can look up on the Caswell SELEX but I've been just doing an hour for everything and that seems to work fine now one thing I mentioned is the tank temperature if you're doing bigger parts it could tend to warm up and you'll have to cool that tank down you want to keep it under 75 degrees but with my small parts and I actually take this whole system put it up on my upstairs garage which isn't heated it's just a lot more ventilated I actually have to warm it up so that's what the little fish tank heater is I just try to keep it above sixty degrees so I'll take this upstairs and let it run for about an hour okay so the anodizing process is all done now we're going to quickly talk about dyes dyes need to be heated up they say to be about 140 degrees I find it varies from color to color and he has kind of got to play with to find out what temperature that color likes so this green 140 seems to work fine the blue one I'm having a lot of problems with but I do find I get a little bit more success if I'm a little bit cooler now as far as buying dyes a lot of people use this clothing type dye you can get it basically anywheres and although it does work the colors like you see the colors aren't super close like that's more pink than purple and believe it or not this is the gray so the colors hit or miss even though it does work so keep that in mind I found the ones you get from Caswell Zi actual anodizing dyes do produce a better better color these are like 20 bucks and these are like 7 bucks so there is a price difference but I think it's worth it worth the extra money to heat them up I'm just using these tea kettles see this one's that one for yellow what already uh they work really well because for one they're only like 14 bucks each to buy and - they heat them up really quick just use a little meat thermometer they'll monitor the temperature and I just do one at a time cuz I'll trip a breaker if I don't yeah one a blue and one of green I'm really hoping the blue is gonna work cuz I really really like the blue color I just tend to get a lot of defects in it with the blue so we'll let this one heat up a little bit more one thing I definitely highly recommend is when you take the parts out of the acid obviously rents it well with distilled water always distilled water but then do a baking soda drinks and that will help to neutralize any of the acid what's left over on the part because any acid from the part where it lands into these dye tanks it's going to give you a blemish almost guaranteed the better you can rent those parts now the better luck you're gonna have with a better looking part so let's take these out give them a quick spray down great in the tank here that look to be honest with you this gets most of the acid off just doing this and then I'm really going to slosh it around this like our well even or I'll even let it soak in here for a little bit again if you get acid on here it's going to cause your problem so now the time just varies based off of how dark you want the part but most people go for about a maximum of 15 minutes you'll know if your anodized right away because it will start taking up some of the died almost instantly swish it around a little bit to make sure there's no bubbles left over and you can see there it's already taken a lot of the dye already see if I can get these up too so they've literally been in the tank for 10 seconds here and that's where we're at for color like so it really soaked it up really good which is awesome just love it it's a really fun process to be honest with you just experimenting to see what kind of results you can get of course you can mask if you want to you can kind of do fade-ins and fade-outs with it there's all kinds of things you can do with it I highly recommend trying it if you're if you're building anything out of aluminum it's a pretty neat process a few final notes here while we're waiting for that to soak disposible of acid if you've got to get rid of your acid a lot of people say you could just neutralize it with baking soda and dump it down the drain I don't know if that's correct or not I'm personally not going to do that I would take a lot of baking soda for one and it would just be like a slurry and a big mess for me I know that my landfill takes household hazardous waste and before I even bought the acid I called them and asked them they sure they would take waste battery acid and they said it wasn't a problem so that's where all dispose of mine once I'm done with this so the last step is just to seal the parts this boiling water that kind of just seals up all the pores and locks that die in you're supposed to boil it for about 15 minutes so you know alright so these parts have been in the boiling water for about 15 minutes now and they are all sealed up and they look really good actually I really like they actually really like both of these colors alright guys make sure you let me know in the comments down below what color you like more I think I lean more towards the green but the blue is really nice too troubleshooting you see you got a dark spot right here and same thing with this along the edges that there's probably due to the tank temperature being too hot so if you cool the dye tank and just leave it in there for longer that should fix that problem this guy here it's just an anodized it didn't take the dye at all so I'm not really sure what happened on this one but it definitely didn't anodized the way it should have this guy here this is what I'm talking about this is probably a leftover acid in between going from the battery acid to the dye tank so really want to make sure that part is ranch 12 before hits to die alright guys I really hope you guys liked this video and you pick up some good information here I'm writing on well thanks for watching

Channel: ShopBuilt

Views: 1,348,956

Rating: 4.8780632 out of 5

Keywords: anodizing, anodize, aluminum, battery acid, diy, homemade, custom, shopbuilt, tips, troubleshooting, how to, woodworking shop, in the shop, machinist, machining, milling, home anodizing, home machine shop, instamachinist, fabrication

Id: P8oesBi7_II

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2018