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Electrolytic Etching, For What A Dremel Can't Do
Dustin writes "A lot of people modify computer cases, often requiring them to cut intricate custom designs in
sheet metal. For most, there is the Dremel tool. But
sometimes, that just isn't good enough. Possibly due to an insanely complex design, or
unsteady hands, a Dremel just might not cut it (pun honestly wasn't intended). JimBob, a member at OverhauledPC.com, has a much better way. Using
readily available salt water and electricity, his technique is much easier than trying
to cut patterns with a rotary tool."
I preloaded this into the Coral Cache, just in case it gets slashdotted.
Here's the Cache Link if it's needed.
Or maybe someone used one in the server network cable... no comments and down.
Using readily available salt water and electricity, his technique is much easier than trying to cut patterns with a rotary tool.
The site is down. Therefore I will assume that he poured water over the case and shocked the shit out of it.
You could get some interesting burn patterns that way. You might even match your case.
The coolest voice ever.
any of the paying Slashdotters wanna grace us with the text?
;)
I promise you'll get lots of Karma for it!
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
First off, there's nothing a Dremel can't do.
But since your alternative involves electricity, water, and chemicals, we'll forgive it. (But next time, could you kindly use something more dangerous than sodium chloride? We've got reputations to uphold here, and if the case mod weren't so danged cool, we'd feel we were slipping.)
http://mirrordot.org/stories/a78b5e9e7316f6c5e22cb 6e6b30c43a3/index.htmlMirrordot link here/URL
got sig?
Now, instead of merely cutting myself, I can electrocute myself as well. I love case modding!
Well, either they've taken their site down, or the "Slashdot Effect" has kicked in. They're gone.
;)
Rats! I wanted to see how this works - suprise my boyfriend by etching the fenders on his 69 Mustang
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Let's see your fancy "salt water" and "electricity" do this!
No, those are just the cheap cases.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
Doesn't this "Dremel" tool look more like something you would see a dentist use?
http://trigeek.net/mirror/etch/guides.php.html
What a true geek would do is build their own computer-controlled laser cutting/etching rig, a few of these together should cut through aluminium or mild steel no problem :)
Nice mirror. You mirrored the front page, and none of the other pages.
I'll try to summarize this since I managed to read the first few pages before the horde of slashdot ate the website.
You take two plates of metal and hold them parallel (not with your hands, they're going to be electrified!) underwater. Electrify the plates and the positive ions in the water will collect at the negative terminal and the negative ions will collect at the positive terminal. By adding some salt to the water however, you can encourage a chemical reaction to happen at a given electrode. By covering the metal with paint or duct tape, you insulate it from this effect. So what they're doing is, essentially, painting around the hole they want to cut, leaving the hole itself barren, then submerging it in saltwater and electrifying it, causing the exposed metal to oxidize and be eaten away.
It's roughly the opposite of electroplating, which is the procedure which this technique is likened to in the article. Instead of trying to accumulate more on a given electrode you're trying to reduce the amount of matter present there.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
how do you produce methane from NaCL, H2O, and Fe ???? I think only H2, and O2 are emitted!!
Yeesh, you would have thought the kid would atleast have worn long sleaves and a face mask (welding mask)... They did this on Mythbusters and the fragments when into the human flesh like gel about 2inches...
One of my friends reminded me the other day of a time when he was making his cooling system. After a while of playing, his computer made wierd noises, and so by looking through the case window we could notice that his cooling system did not work. Basically it looked like a carwash inside his computer. I feel that the best case designs come from mistake, even though that mistake cost him his wonderful computer parts. But lego cases look cool too.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Dam it you got me! And I'm at work too.
--Sir_-_Jeff--
Wouldn't the reciever be the teabagee?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Isn't that how they make dioxins?
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Kinda apropos, dremel has a Case Modding Project on their website. They cut the word DREMEL into a case. Looks nifty.
Kirk: Spoooock!
Scotty: He's dead already, Jim.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Soundproofing Warning do no
FeCl3 is cheap, relatively safe (don't eat it kids!), and easy to handle. It stains like a bitch though, and will attack most metals so be careful with spills.
http://www.mirrordot.org/
Works on brass too. but its harder to get ahold of that stuff nowadays. Drano will probably work faster on Aluminum and not require electricity but you got to play with the concentrations or the process will heat up so fast it will melt your resist.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Oh well...
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
This is a terrible guide. Several times he says "make sure you know what you're doing" but offers no help or explanation. It is poorly worded and offers little guidance. The pictures do not help at all, either. Does anyone know of a better guide for electrolytic etching?
Too bad the site's down; For now I guess I'll be stuck using my Dremel to ruin things.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Apparently not OverhauledServer.com.
The bigger your container, the more salt you'll need. The amount of salt is not an exact science, I used a 15 gallon fish tank and it worked with anywhere from a few tablespoons of salt to an entire 26 ounce canister of salt. Ideally you should have about 40% or so saturation.
Funny, I thought basic chemistry was an exact science.
That's a very nice cached copy of their "slashdotted" page, but not exactly what I was looking for.
Easily done. Head to Techniks or some other similar place and get some Press 'n Peel PCB transfer film.
Draw what you want to etch as a negative and then iron it onto your metal. Dip the whole thing in the acid bath and wait a bit. Steel wool to clean off the resist and that should do it.
If you're really cheap, toner is a decent resist. No different than making a homebrew PCB.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
RECORD /. @ Hits: 493
taken from page 3.
Man, he needs a new server.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
instead of gibbering about with colloquialsms that amount to duck speak, the editors could have used a single word 'inadequate' instead of 'make the cut(pun honestly not intended'. Go ahead mod me offtopic Words either have meaning or they don't.
This technology is nothing new. My father built systems to do R&D and production using Electro Chemical Machining. This process is half science and half art.
Items used every day may have under gone this process, turbine fan blades, air bag explosive chambers, hard drive motors (meow), test sabot rounds for tanks. This is a fantastic process that is underrated by other parts of the machining industry.
Instead of all of this electricity, etc. why not use plain old acid? (Like from a car battery or something). Maybe even H2SO4 or HCl from a hobby store.
Cover the "canvas" with masking tape. Draw your design. Cut out your design with a sharp X-Acto blade. Etch the exposed design with a bead-blaster (like a sand-blaster, but uses smaller, more uniform glass beads, and doesn't eat away as much, as fast).
Been doing this for years.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I managed to grab a link out of the page from mirrordot before it went tits-up again. This is the link the guy got part of his idea from.
http://gravert.club.fr/galvetch/contfram.htm
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
This technology is nothing new. My father built systems to do R&D and production using Electro Chemical Machining. [...]
Items used every day may have under gone this process, turbine fan blades, air bag explosive chambers, hard drive motors (meow), test sabot rounds for tanks.
Are you sure those are all built by electrochemical machining? I suspect some of them are built by its close relative: electrodynamic machining.
Electrochemical machining is reverse electroplating. It pulls metal atoms out, not just from the cut, but from the surrounding metal that is intended to remain, changing its properites.
Electrodynamic machining is a spark to the workpiece through a dilectric solution (typically water or oil). It can cut through anything that can be made to conduct. (You do diamonds by flashing a bit of metal over them for the initial contact. As you're removing diamond, the surface that's left has a microscopic layer that is converted to graphite to keep you going.)
Three sorts of tools:
- Use the end of a wire as a drill. (Feed the wire as the end erodes.)
- Use the side of a wire as a bandsaw. (Feed the wire in the inches-per-minute range so the cutting edge is always smooth and of a known size.)
- Make a graphite electrode in the shape of the hole you want and burn your way in. (Graphite doesn't erode much at all. Replace as needed.)
Cutting action: The spark vaporizes a path through the dilectric and melts a tiny pit in the workpiece. (Polarity is chosen so most of the melting is on the workpiece.) When the spark stops the channel collapses and the shockwave blasts the molten material out of the pit before it can re-harden. Repeat at a rate in the kilohertz range. Spark generally forms at the shortest space, which is where you want to remove the most metal, giving you a mirror finish.
(This effect was originally discovered in Russia about WW II when an engineer tried increasing the life of ignition "points" by putting them in an oil bath to cool them. They disintegrated within hours. It's also why you always use a brush to run current around a lubricated ball- or roller-bearing instead of passing it through the bearing: The effect would destroy the bearing surfaces in a similarly short time.)
The cut-away material ends up as a contaminant in the dilectric. So you pump that through a filter to clean it out.
Motion control is paramount: You sense the spark voltage to tell how far you are from the workpiece and use it for feedback, advancing or backing up to keep your spark path at the correct length.
Contaminants (especially chips) sometimes short the gap, so you back out until you clear it and can spark again. Sometimes you end up machining away the chip. Sometimes you may have to back far - even completely - out of a cut to clear the contaminant from your gap. This may mean retracing your path around several turns. (In the shaped-carbon-rod drill-in mode you also run the rod in little circles and/or back-and-forth it now and then to pump the dirty dilectric out and clean stuff in.)
You're CONSTANTLY backing-and forthing. MOST of your tool motion is back-and-forth, a small fraction is motion into the workpiece as the cut advances. So you MUST use an integer motion-control algorithm that retraces its steps exactly (or within an LSB or so) and doesn't accumulate roundoff err. Any accumulated roundoff, even a TINY bit, quickly walks you out of your path and into the workpiece, shutting you down.
The device is essentially a big power supply, a resistor, a switch, a voltage measurement peripheral, a computer, a motion table, and a dilectric pump/filter. Most of the energy ends up in the resistor. You do it that way as the easy way to control the spark's waveshape. The switch might be a bunch of paralleled FETs on a big heatsink. The resistor might be a bunch of foot-long power resistors, with a fan blowing on them so you can run them far beyond their normal ratings, carefully wired to minimize parasitic inductance.
That's the bulk of the specialized knowlege you'd need to build one, as they were about 15-20 years ago (when I did software for one).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Theory and practice are two seperate entities. How pure is the water? How high is the voltage? What is the metal's composition? How accuratly has everything been measured to?
In other words, "Science is accurate, the world is frequently innacurate."
I have freaks! I did something right...
and is hence out of context
I have freaks! I did something right...
The server was down before I could read the whole article, but it sounds like the same technique many amateur pulsejet builders use to manufacture their reed valves. http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/makevalves1.pdf
"If you've done it correctly, the cathode metal should emit bubbles. This process will produce methane gas so this should be done outside and away from all open flames." Actually it will be emitting hydrogen gas, slightly more exposive than methane. So I wouldn't recommend that anyone try doing a large mod in their basement next to the furnace with this technique...
There is a coil pattern etched into the case after the network cable sitting there vaporized.
Hmm.... a nice, silent, battery-or extension cord-powered, "set it and forget it" breaking and entering technique, might have to try this out. Those metalic things called locks might be a good place to start. The only supply needed is salt and a transformer, not all that suspicious.
2*31*37*263
Still this is worthy of being on slashdot because it may save a little labor over all, and more importantly, it's totally nerdy.
Using salt for this will produce chlorine in addition to oxygen.
Use baking soda or sodium hydroxide instead. Either electrolyte will give off substantially less-dangerous byproducts.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
I have seen sites in the past where they appeared to serve an informative function, and were moderated appropriately.
Then the site suddenly became obscene... with it rated favorably.
At the time I type this, the link was pointing to a pagefull of obscene ascii "art".
It may well have been pointing to something useful when you saw it.
There are people out there who get their jollies off making some of us look like an a**.
Lesson: Be very careful moderating AC posts containing links.
Those links may change after you have moderated it, leaving your moderation in place and your credibility in the can.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
You're not going to cut anything with a wimpy little 5mW laser. What you want here is to make a nice home built 50W Nitrogen laser. Of course it'll be a pulse laser so you'll need to add some circuitry to cycle the pulses. Of course this is a *very* dangerous laser. It'll cut off all kinds of body parts, or mod parts, not to mention possibly elctrocuting yourself should you fail to shield/build it properly. The best part is this can be built out of scrap parts you might have laying around and use air as your source. Tuning is the real trick here or you get nothing but a big electrical noop device. Then, of course, you'll have Sun to deal with!
At least three of today's headlines have punctuation or grammatical errors: "Electrolytic Etching, For What A Dremel Cant Do", "Bill Gates Handwriting Analyzed", "ATI at the Top Graphics Chip Maker for 2004".
-- SYS 64738 --
Steals your clipboard.
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Have you metaroderated recently?
compressed air to form a plasma beam. no warping or hardening.
A REAL geek would use Explosive Forming.
I'm looking, and while this is very neat, I don't see it getting results superior to those you'll be getting with a dremel that has a depth gauge, a spin saw set for metal, and a set of router bits.
This is also pretty labour intensive, you have to completely paint the area you don't want destroyed first, then you can destroy the non-painted area, then you'll probabally have to refinish the edges on anything really complex like a spider design, or text, because in the pictures the cut lines are pretty ragged.
Once again, don't get me wrong, this is very neat; and if your looking for a rough-hewn 'disolved by acid' look, it's perfect; but to say that it's superior to a well stocked dremel or spin saw is stretching things.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
hehe... intricate custom designs, hehe, that would indeed be the ultimate case-mod! That is, until your mother in-law asks you what it is supposed to represent...
hehe
I've got an old case that I thermite modded...
Put a nice pile of thermite on the top, added a bit of sugar as a fuse, and then dripped a bit of conc. sulphuric acid onto the sugar to light it...
I positioned the pile right on the edge, so it melted the top of the case and then left some trails of molten iron down the side. It looked very cool.
We also found that using a small amount of pseudo-thermite (thermite with a lot of magnesium filings) we could draw on the sides of cases pretty effectively...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
Ok, so the poster writes:
'Pure water actually has a high amount of electrical resistance'
and to this you respond:
'No it doesn't, it has a non-infinite resistance'.
Since when did 'high amount' equal 'infinite amount'?
The Germans have a word which fits you very well. Besserwisser, which translates as 'faultfinder', 'know-it-all' or 'smart-ass'.
You are so much sickness. I fear what the future holds. I have hope that the web is adapting to google now, not the other hand and say in a single row along the length of each other. The operating system has to take hard decisions on whether reclaim memory from the page cache entry are still managed through the buffer cache also has the limitation that cached data must always be mapped into kernel virtual space, which puts an additional artif
I really don't want to be electrified!) underwater. Electrify the plates and the positive terminal. By adding some salt to the muzzle of a tree? Shoot him in the cache. The buffer cache is also pretty good, except when things break, which does happen. I was one of these things, as has happened to me on a first-run apple ][ standard (integer roms and casette tape. I really don't want to cut, leaving the hole they want to play.
Gil amelio and his drive to gain business credibility really put a huge pain on the spur of the opposite of electroplating, which is the largest gland in the article. Because i'm on the amount of data that can be collected using one of these things, as has happened to me on a windows machine, then microsoft will be very upset when i tell her.
...though he gets the name of the gas wrong. He says "methane", my freshman chemistry thinks it should be "hydrogen".
:-)
Think "Hindenberg"
Is there an easier way to do it with a dremel? What part number is best for this?
The 40% solution mentioned in the article probably limits the strength.
Keep it off of your 501's or we will know you can't use a Dremel tool.
From: Electrochlor.com
1.2 Reactions
The principle reactions occurring in the electrolytic cell that produces sodium hypochlorite are quite simple, as shown in the following:
Oxidation of the chloride ion occurs at the anode:
2Cl- -> 2Cl2 + 2e-
Followed by a rapid hydrolysis of the chlorine:
Cl2 + H2O -> HOCl + HCl
Reduction of the sodium ion occurs at the cathode:
Na+ + e- -> Na
Followed by a rapid reaction of the sodium with water:
Na+ + H2O -> 1/2H2 + NaOH
The acids (HCl and HOCL) produced at the anode react with the base (NaOH) produced at the cathode:
HCl + NaOH -> NaCl + H2O and,
HOCl + NaOH -> NaOCl + H2O
The net reaction of electrolysis is:
NaCl + H2Oe- -> NaOCl + H2
The amount of hypochlorite produced is related directly to the amount of direct electrical current passed through the cell.
Easier to read on web site. I had to hack in '->'s.
We have been doing this for years... Ever hear of making PC boards...
Or how about valves for pulsejet engines..
Using it on a PC case? Isnt that pretty much common sence?
Sheesh.. Has the whole world 'gone dumb' or what..
What is next "ooh, look the sun rises. Must be something to get exited about"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Betcha can't do that with a Dremel tool.
Now, if there was a way to transfer the image produced by a printer to the board, you would be golden. I have tried printing with a laser printer on a magazine and photo papers, and then ironing it over the board. It is almost ok, but the resolution is very poor and the transfer gives a lot of tiny holes. The has got to be a way using cheap materials to do it.
RE:Electrolytic Etching, For What A Dremel Can't Do: Same process used to cut the rifling (cut spiral grooves within (a gun barrel) in small cannons, like 25MM Bushmaster. Works real good!
Apply a negative mask.
A stencil and spray paint works.
Or you can use toner transfer sheets to copy the negative at the local copy store and transfer it with an iron.
Or you can paint it free hand.
Or...
Anyway, just go buy some store brand lye and use it to etch. No 2nd plate, no electricity. Stir for faster etch and less undercut.
What happened to using a Hammer?
You could use a non-conductive substrate clad with a conductive metal. Then you tape off an electrical circuit path and use the method described in the article to remove the metal from the uncovered areas. Darn it, I think this would work!!!!
one more to add to the old phrase,
"duct tape and vise grips, the wrong tools for every job."
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Or, just build your own Linux-based Electro Discharge Machining system. There's even a distro for it.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
I inherited this from my grandfather the machinist. People always ask me what I would need a milling machine for, but they've never seen my case mods.
Can we say 'Darwin Award'?
Some IDIOT will follow this guys instructions... leaving out some minor detail... and hooking up some outrageously strong power source... and poof.