Will it Black an Entire Aluminum Part?

you're asking yourself two burning questions right now the first unfortunately i can't help you with and if we can be honest for a minute only you really know the answer to pause the video if you have to and take a long deep look but the second i can answer my lathe is set up with a collet chuck because the parts i'd like to make require quite the concentricity well it's not exactly concentric no no it is this bar stock is really really close to the final size of my parts i can't really afford to have it five thou off or the outside diameter might not clean up all the way around if this stock is off axis in the lathe even a little i won't be able to turn a clean od of the correct size if you've got some sweat on your brow because you don't own a collet chuck no problem a four jaw chuck wait a minute i did it again didn't i this is the middle of the video isn't it i'm so embedded let's jump back in time and start again dracarys [Music] well that's never happened before this is aluminum black which i would have bet the farm was called a luma black but lucky for me i don't own a farm but talk about the mandela effect huh i'm pretty sure we all know what this is i've always seen it around anyway never tried it never quite trusted it in theory i think this is basically cold blue only for aluminum i'm sure chemically it works different but i think anyway you dip aluminum parts in this stuff and they turn black i mean it says it right on the label aluminum black metal finish touch up scratched or married areas quickly quick refresher if this is coming out of the blue here is a metal part with no finish this is as machined here is the same part or similar part that's been cold blued cold blue is an easy peasy room temperature process that despite its name turns metal parts black why would one want to turn their parts black i hear you asking well they look better tell me that doesn't look better dare i say more professional that and i think the cold blue finish helps keep the parts from rusting or slows the rusting down anyway though these parts are about same age probably exactly the same age and the naked one hasn't rusted yet shows almost no signs of rusting heck now that i think about it i have blued parts that have rusted so what do i know nonetheless in my opinion this looks better if i may speak chemically for a moment the cold blue stuff is selenium dioxide i think we've mentioned that before in this channel but most well-adjusted people call it cold blue and it only works with steel anyway aluminum black despite the fact that i'm holding it in my hand right now this is advertised as non-dimensional that means it's not paint it won't add size to your part i don't know if it oxidizes the aluminum maybe pits it nooks and crannies and all that and dyes it black below the surface or what it does but we'll see how it goes so why have i been hesitant to try this stuff i don't know i've always known aluminum to require anodizing to turn it black or a color i guess i don't understand how a room temperature process like this could do it and not just wipe clean off second i've only really seen it used and advertised for small touch-ups scratches things like that i've never seen it used to black an entire part so there must be a catch right yeah sure i probably could have checked online before spending my money see the sorts of results others have gotten but i'm stubborn your first instinct might be to grab some aluminum out of your scrap pile clean it up a bit and try a little sample part of scrap right easy but let me stop you right there i happen to have a master's degree in murphy's law if we tried this on a part that meant absolutely nothing to us it would work perfect it'd be black as night and bulletproof most beautiful thing you've ever laid your eyes on with that confidence well you might go on to make promises you probably won't be able to keep and end up with egg on your face and parts that look like poop and not that cool looking black poop you get sometimes so in order to really test this we need to make something that means something to us we need a dog in this fight a horse in this race a fox in this hen house a subplot for this video let's make a couple of these this is a magazine like one you might find in a newsstand but different first this is made of metal specifically aluminum how serendipitous second instead of articles and photos of unattainable beauty standards it holds pellets which is convenient because until now i've had to hold them in my nose if you're wondering these are 177 pellets or 4.5 millimeters if you're feeling international you just push them in this one holds 14 pellets they're cleverly or not so cleverly held in with two little o-rings and get these out without breaking them just a little friction fit without the o-ring they don't really stay in there i have two of these and i'd like to make two more if we look at some of the details there's the center hole that it pivots around 14 holes around the edge there's a groove for those o-rings and there's this gear-like feature that is used for indexing a little pin or lever comes in and just pushes it to the next hole there are some little grooves around the edges a detent pin goes in here and that's really it if you're wondering if i couldn't just buy more of these first you're in the wrong place and second no i can't they're nowhere to be found no stock left in the size that i need and i can't really wait either if i don't act fast how will me and my children hold back the beer and pop can invasion they're almost an inch and a half in diameter and pretty darn close to half inch thick again 14 holes the gear feature some divots around the perimeter and the groove for the o-rings nothing i don't think we can't do in fact if we're making just one this wouldn't be too much of a challenge for a manual mill in a rotary table okay maybe a little bit of a challenge and you might need a dividing head instead of rotary table to get 14 accurate divisions but since i want to make two and i'd like to hold on to my will to live we'll do it on the cnc i already have bar stock that's pretty darn close to this size i think we can rough out these diameters turn this groove and then just use the cnc to put in the holes this little gear feature and the detents that bar stock is already in the lathe so let's head over it's not here or more accurately it's not here yet it should probably appear any minute now did i go too far is this even the right day hold on i'm gonna go check my phone yeah 2022 that's right i think you know what it's probably just still back in the wreck i can just wait wait one minute am i about to trap myself for an eternity in one of those paradoxes my great great grandchildren keep warning me about as much as i'd like to tempt fate i am a married man i have this aluminum cut off so let's just see and see the whole thing no lathe not for now anyway lathe still might be the fastest way to clean up the back face but we'll see but first things first usually let's get all of these dimensions and move the part into cad this o-ring groove is the reason i wanted to start on the lathe in 3-axis cnc this groove is an undercut there's no way for a tool that comes from the top to get under there and that presents a challenge i am not much for challenges but as things go i'm gonna have to make one you could in theory cnc most of these features the ones you can get at from the top and then at the end put the part in the lathe and cut the groove but we'd have to hold on to it this way on that small detent side if we want to cut a groove and clean up the back in one operation but that wouldn't be a lot to hold on to or register with and the less we flip this part around and move it between machines the better so to do this on the mill we'll have to cut the o-ring groove from the top and we essentially need to make or buy i guess a t-slot style cutter let's and that my friends is how you make a five flute cutter with a six sided i'm gonna have to watch that video again did i grab onto the flange maybe i don't know what i did but i can tell you what i'm not gonna do i'm not gonna make another one of these this is hardened tempered and sharpened on the grinder with this tool we should now be able to come in from the top and get underneath to mill that o-ring groove hate to toot my own horn but these turned out pretty nice except i might have done something wrong in the cat just pulling your leg parts of the right size well close anyway i miked them and was three thou off on the thickness most likely i think an error picking up the zero after a tool change or maybe i forgot to add a finished pass but here they are i cleaned up that thickness on the lathe not as hard to hold after all at least just for facing not for cutting that groove but i had to be careful and indicate them in again there's not a lot to grab onto i realize i haven't shown you every step of making these but this is a machining channel and i want to keep the videos manageable so only makes sense to cut out the machining wasn't anything too exciting anyway some might say run of the mill though i probably owe it to you to at least show the slot cutter in action it did pretty good for a five and a half tooth cutter it's probably hard to see here but it's making nice clean baby chips i did however have to hog out a fair bit of material around the parts to make clearance for the size of the slot cutter so it could drop in get in there and get back out without fouling the other parts or the vice for that matter before that it was just a bunch of spot facing then drilling and some reaming you really didn't miss much but if you're interested check out any other one of my videos that include a hole but all of that has conspired to bring us here my friends to the present i've run into a bit of a pickle i hadn't given much or any consideration to whatsoever these parts are really hard to deburr specifically where the o-ring groove cuts into the holes see that little square window of sorts that's the opening that lets the o-ring actually do its thing but those edges are really sharp and there are a lot of burrs in there i'd like to clean out d-bearing these parts by hand is nigh impossible what these need is a vibratory tumbler if you don't know what that is imagine a washing machine basically but chock full of rocks the parts jiggle around in there bumping into abrasive media rocks pellets walnut shells and viola they're deburred now i don't have a box of rocks nor do i have a washing machine i could fill full of rocks without getting in trouble but what i do have is a can half full of blasting media or half empty i suppose depending just how sunny your disposition might be now this isn't the right stuff to use this is very sharp silica sand i think but that's all i've got and i'm gonna see if it'll debur my parts i don't expect it to work in fact i highly doubt it but like i told my wife on our first date let's just give it a try see what happens besides not having a box of rocks or a washing machine i can't put them into i also don't have a lid for this can this is so not going to end what we're looking for is relative motion between the parts and the abrasive normally i think you'd deburr for 4 5 6 24 hours but given how aggressive this stuff is i'm going to check it i don't know 10 minute intervals the filing machine did nothing good i did speed it up compared to what you saw in that clip it really wasn't doing anything at all parts just sitting on top but then i got it moving fast enough to hear things banging around nonetheless after i don't know 30 40 minutes i was really only getting surface pitting and no real deburring i think i was running into like a brazil nut effect or a reverse brazil nut effect i have no idea i'm not even sure i know what a brazil nut is so i started trying out some of the other machine tools completely inexplicably the bandsaw did even less than the die file but then i tried the lathe i didn't start with the lathe because i figured at the can diameter that i'm using it wouldn't run slow enough to get the parts and sand in there rolling around on each other i figured the parts would stick to the walls like one of those cyclone rides and potentially lose their pants so i've had a look at these under high magnification and it's debatable if that lathe actually did anything at all i mean maybe this ran for an hour and a half hour 45 minutes before i got sick and tired of hearing that lathe spin it did knock some of the sharp edges off those windows at least maybe the little chips that were just barely hanging on but there's still sharpish edges i'm going to give this a once over with a small stone just play it safe and i realized i didn't actually show you how these things work so let me do maybe you'd like to see that with the cover off i suppose this is the moment we've all been waiting for i'm happy with the parts they're cleaned i didn't have any 450 percent isopropyl alcohol so i washed them all five times in some ninety percent it looks like cold blue you guys as nervous as i am it's fizzing i wasn't expecting that i probably shouldn't be breathing this stuff i mean that looks gross but rather promising let me drop another one in and go wash this off immediately well it's kind of just washing right off literally maybe i need to leave this in there longer it looks like it's dissolving my part oh it's hot it's really quite hot i don't know if i'm in focus but it's flaking off stuck on the back pretty good i can't even tell you what that smells like i'm gonna go wash these a bit and just keep running them through the ringer here so after a few washes and a few dunks maybe not bad all in all it was a little more violent than i expected but then i realized i didn't really follow the instructions i should have left one behind and just kind of brushed this stuff on but here's what it looks like when it's sort of dry wash this in water blew it down with the air gun this is still a little humid if i leave this to dry it's going to look like this and this one is this with oil on it so the surface does become very porous the parts are almost fuzzy can you see that texture on the back not sure if it's the stuff or if it pitted the part hopefully you can see this or the surface finish rather this is the original factory part anodized i assume here's the one i did the longest ago it's oiled that's the one we just oiled together and that is out of the solution washed and dried i'm not sure what that orangey stuff is on there maybe there's some chemists out there tell us what's going on but can you see that it's sort of got a texture to it almost like the aluminum has been pitted it didn't attack that smooth side as aggressively this was the lathe turned finished side yeah it looks like a really light blast a very fine orange peel i'm going to finish these other ones before it's too late before we get into any lessons learned here i just want to say in editing the footage you've seen so far i'll be honest these parts look like trash zoomed in sure in real life they're not winning any beauty contests but no one can see these as well as you've been looking at them under high magnification for reference these are about the size of an oreo cookie maybe a little smaller that said let's cover some of the key takeaways first i don't recommend whole hog dunking your parts in this stuff perhaps just brush it on like the instructions say or if you do dunk maybe don't let them cook for so long perhaps just in and out i'm getting the impression it's better to just build this finish up slowly second if you're going to try this on a lot of aluminum crack a window or something the cyanide gas or whatever it gives off is brutal probably not a big deal if you're just doing little scratches and scuff marks third if you don't follow the instructions on the bottle this stuff is not non-dimensional i'd go so far as to call it dimensional my parts have grown about one to one and a half thou all over though i suppose that might be non-dimensional to some i'm not judging fourth i think we're up to four don't be a hero would it have killed you to try this on some scrap first lastly perhaps most important thanks for watching i stripped all that black off wire brush and scotch brite the holes which are the most important part of these things closed up more than a few thousand so i ream them out and although that finish seemed very durable at least to the parts it actually stuck to while reaming it sort of broke out in flakes which freaked me out what if little bits of this come loose later and foul up the works that'd be no good so in conclusion just like i said at the beginning try some aluminum black inappropriately to get that aged weathered look on your aluminum parts you sit there and tell me these don't look like 25 cent parts from a yard sale

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 1,077,791

Keywords: birchwood casey, alumablack, black anodize, anodized aluminum

Id: 7Y6_cmIWj2c

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022