October 31st, 2008 WendyLee
I received my latest edition of Art Jewelry magazine and read with enthusiasm an article on etching metal with a D cell battery and saltwater. The article was written by Ron Pascho. I was at first a bit insure surely it can;t be that easy. So the mad scientist in me just had to give it a try.
My initial thoughts were to be correct its not that easy. Have you ever tried to find Pure Salt! My local area does not appear to have many food preservers and there doesn;t appear to be a demand for Kosher Salt. If you actually read the packets of salt you will see that the majority of the salt packets have an anti caking aagent added to them. I could pick up pure salt from my local Bunnings but the 25kg sack that they had for sale appeared to be a little excessive. But for those of you who have a need for a sack this big it was in the pool section. I eventually found some salt at a coles who has a large selection of kosher foods.
The rest of the stuff I needed was easily purchased at Jaycar. The battery holder, leads, D cell battery. They also sell the PNP Blue paper for transferring the images onto the metal. ( I already had this at home) I recommend you shop at Jaycar if you need to purchase the lot as they had everything. Dick Smith and other electronic places did not sell the PNP paper.
So all excited with all my new purchases I headed home ready to play. I was very excited about this tutorial as it has been a long time since I have played just for the the sake of playing and experimenting.
I am not going to go into the detailed setup or the making of the solution, I really recommend you purchase the magazine as it is a fantastic issue. Its the November Issue of Art Jewelry Magazine with Deb Karash’s stunning floral pendant on the front.
Above is the set up that I used. The piece that I was etching was a piece of copper that I had transferred the image onto the metal with PNP Blue paper. I love this stuff, I have not had many problems with it although the occasional glitch when I first started working with. I will go into these later in another post.
This is the solution looking all murky and yucky after a hard days etching.
Ok now I bet you want to see my results. Wellll, the whole procedure worked, it did etch the metal although I did find the process a little slow and the definition was not as good as when etching with Ferric Chloride in which I am able to get very sharp crisp lines.
The problem with this piece was that firstly the transfer was not complete on the copper, this was because I rushed the part where I transferred the image onto the copper as I was anxious to get etching.
The second attempt I chose a deisgn that was more solid in design and not so many fine lines. It worked!!!!!!!, The etch was deeper and there was more definition in the lines.
Overall I was happy with the tutorial and the experimenting that I did, I think this is a great way to set up Etching at home without the use of yucky chemicals. Although I did find this method a little slow. If you use a bigger battery and gave it more juice it would work quicker. Stay tuned for the reults when I rigged up the seup to the rectifier to make it etch faster!
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