RepProdigious
Enlightened
Well, i got a little bored today and when looking at my 18650 Ti lego quark i decided that the black made the light waay too massive, so i decided to lighten it up a bit by removing the anodizing layer from the main tube. I figured some of you might be interested in how to de-anodize parts so i made this little how-to!
Needed:
-SAFETY (plenty fresh air, eye protection, good rubber gloves, the works!)
-Anodized part
-Glass jar
-Crofty
-Water
-Toothbrush (an old one, or one from someone you really dislike)
Optional:
-Thermometer
-Hand polish materials
-Some form of polishing machine
Step one: Preparation!
Remove everything from the part, and mask the parts you don't want to have de-anodized. You can do this by painting the parts you want to protect over with nail-polish, or just mess about a bit with tape, caps, rubber and stuff (like i did). Remember, as soon as something can get in contact with water its anodizing layer will be damaged or removed.
Here's the part i am going to do;
Now, the plan is to de-anodize it for looks only and keeping the threads intact (for several reasons like wear, smoothness and to keep thread play low) so i protected the ends and also closed the tube up to prevent the inside from de-anodizing.
Here's the part with the protected bits;
As you can see i simply used some old o-rings to get a nice watertight seal.
The setup:
Here you can see how simple i keep things, just the part and a way to move it around (push under water/remove from water);
The process:
My method of choice is as follows; Warm water (i found 40-50 celcius works best with my old weak crofty) and just enough crofty in the jar to fully dissolve ('saturated') while keeping an eye on the temperature to see if nothing is getting out of hand while the reaction is doing its thing
Here's a pic after bath 1:
Pretty uneven de-anodizing, and nowhere near how i want it to look.... But the bath seemed saturated with the dye (dont know if that really matters tho) so i made a nice new bath!
Here's the part after its second bath;
Looking better already, color is evening out quite nice....
Now, the 3rd bath gave it the tint/look i was looking for (sorry, no picture) so i threw away half the bath and filled the jar back up with cold water to make the reaction nice and slow and i started to brush the part whilst holding it under water to remove the gunk build-up on the surface of the part.... .It came out like this:
Here you can see how nice the cap/o-ring protected the threads, also note the nice tight separation line between black and alu;
The other side looks just as nice:
Checking your work:
The chemical reaction can create some heavy pitting in the surface of the aluminium. To check this you can give the whole part a quick and dirty polish using alu polish and the toothbrush (also a great way to remove the last bits of anodizing gunk from the knurling)
As you can see here, there's some pitting in my material but nothing too bad. A proper polishing job with the right equipment will fix this easy:
Here's another nice shot that shows the line between bare and black, also shows the pitting (or very light 'orange peel' if you like)
And a quick little test to see if everything still goes together:
Now all i need to do is polish the part up to a mirror-finish and its done. I know the polished aluminium will never compare to the nice warm titanium but it'll look a lot better than it did, and the 18650 tube is only for spare anyway in case i need to use the light for a bit longer and don't have anything else than my quark. I'll keep the black belts (i like those) and as you can see the light doesn't look as massive as one of those all-black lights!
Needed:
-SAFETY (plenty fresh air, eye protection, good rubber gloves, the works!)
-Anodized part
-Glass jar
-Crofty
-Water
-Toothbrush (an old one, or one from someone you really dislike)
Optional:
-Thermometer
-Hand polish materials
-Some form of polishing machine
Step one: Preparation!
Remove everything from the part, and mask the parts you don't want to have de-anodized. You can do this by painting the parts you want to protect over with nail-polish, or just mess about a bit with tape, caps, rubber and stuff (like i did). Remember, as soon as something can get in contact with water its anodizing layer will be damaged or removed.
Here's the part i am going to do;
Now, the plan is to de-anodize it for looks only and keeping the threads intact (for several reasons like wear, smoothness and to keep thread play low) so i protected the ends and also closed the tube up to prevent the inside from de-anodizing.
Here's the part with the protected bits;
As you can see i simply used some old o-rings to get a nice watertight seal.
The setup:
Here you can see how simple i keep things, just the part and a way to move it around (push under water/remove from water);
The process:
My method of choice is as follows; Warm water (i found 40-50 celcius works best with my old weak crofty) and just enough crofty in the jar to fully dissolve ('saturated') while keeping an eye on the temperature to see if nothing is getting out of hand while the reaction is doing its thing
Here's a pic after bath 1:
Pretty uneven de-anodizing, and nowhere near how i want it to look.... But the bath seemed saturated with the dye (dont know if that really matters tho) so i made a nice new bath!
Here's the part after its second bath;
Looking better already, color is evening out quite nice....
Now, the 3rd bath gave it the tint/look i was looking for (sorry, no picture) so i threw away half the bath and filled the jar back up with cold water to make the reaction nice and slow and i started to brush the part whilst holding it under water to remove the gunk build-up on the surface of the part.... .It came out like this:
Here you can see how nice the cap/o-ring protected the threads, also note the nice tight separation line between black and alu;
The other side looks just as nice:
Checking your work:
The chemical reaction can create some heavy pitting in the surface of the aluminium. To check this you can give the whole part a quick and dirty polish using alu polish and the toothbrush (also a great way to remove the last bits of anodizing gunk from the knurling)
As you can see here, there's some pitting in my material but nothing too bad. A proper polishing job with the right equipment will fix this easy:
Here's another nice shot that shows the line between bare and black, also shows the pitting (or very light 'orange peel' if you like)
And a quick little test to see if everything still goes together:
Now all i need to do is polish the part up to a mirror-finish and its done. I know the polished aluminium will never compare to the nice warm titanium but it'll look a lot better than it did, and the 18650 tube is only for spare anyway in case i need to use the light for a bit longer and don't have anything else than my quark. I'll keep the black belts (i like those) and as you can see the light doesn't look as massive as one of those all-black lights!
