More Anodizing Problems - Important Read! · Mar 5, 16:34
You would think this is simple enough…
Temperature control and rinsing, rinsing, rinsing between tanks is important as is making sure your parts don’t ding around your bucket and nick and scratch other parts. And of course, solid and secure electrical contact is key to a nice anodize.
How do we know? We’ll show you some parts below.
Now, we sometimes just make silly mistakes. One example would be when we left the parts in the anodize tank for over one hour (not the problem) with the leads reversed! (BIG problem!)
This is what a part looks like after we neglected to pay attention to the lead reversal and then continued to send it into the dye tank:
Oops!
Once we had the leads set up properly, we proceeded to dunk the parts in the tanks.
And then, we realized that some of the parts didn’t have good enough contact:
Notice that some of the parts are darker than others. The darker blue block had two screws secured to the block and the aluminum wire wrapped around them. This standard black oxide alloy finish proceeded to fizz abundantly in the anodize tank. Next time, we’ll just jam the wire into the threaded holes or use aluminum screws (which go for about $0.15 each).
Then, there were issues with the dye fading off the parts!
Clearly, we didn’t rinse off the parts well enough (we think) and perhaps some of the acid remained. Although, we did douse the parts liberally…
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