I spent this weekend trying to figure out how to transfer an
image to metal for etching.
There is a lot of info on this online, many different methods
and materials and ideas. I’ve read/watched
about 20 different tutorials on the topic.
The etching process crosses over into a lot of different
industries; jewelry making, crafting, printmaking, weapon-smithing, sign making,
electronics (it’s how they make circuit boards!), and I’ve been exploring all
of them in my quest to master this art.
The basic idea is to lay down a resist on the metal, which
will protect the surface during etching.
The areas covered with the resist will not etch away, while the exposed
areas will, creating a 3-D image.
There are different ways to apply resist. You can just freehand it with permanent
markers or certain kinds of paint or ink.
You can stamp an image. You can
make a stencil cut from adhesive material, or use a UV photo process to make a
stencil.
Or you can print the design with a laser printer and use
heat to transfer the toner to your metal.
Since I have a laser printer and an iron, and this method seems to
produce crisp transfers of intricate images, I figured this would be the best
way to go. There are many ways that people have devised of doing this, and I
tried just about all of them this weekend.
I tried laser printing my designs on regular copy paper, transparencies,
glossy photo paper, matt photo paper, a special blue transfer sheet made
especially for transferring images to metal, magazine pages ripped from a
catalog, even the slick backing sheet you peel your Avery labels off of.
I tried ironing for different lengths of time, at different heat
settings, using different pressure/motions of the iron, on top of different
ironing surfaces. I tried quenching the
hot metal in cold water, and hot water.
Sometimes the toner didn’t stick to the metal at all. Sometimes the paper moved during ironing,
smearing the image. Sometimes the toner
melted too much and blurred the image.
Sometimes only bits of the image stuck.
Sometimes most of the image looked great, but one part was marred
somehow. Sometimes the image would feather into the minute grooves made by
sanding the surface to give the toner something to grip. Sometimes the paper left little fuzzy fibers on the surface of the transferred toner.
Saturday was a frustrating day. None of my 30 or so attempts to transfer the
laser toner to metal resulted in a satisfactory image.
It looks so easy in the tutorial videos! Yeah, you just iron it on there – BING!!! Perfect image transfer!
For some reason, it wasn’t working for me.
One thing this taught me is that the tiniest speck of dirt
or oil on the metal surface will screw things up. And metal is surprisingly dirty, even when it
looks clean. Just the natural oils on
our skin can cause problems, so you have to be super careful when handling
it. Sanding will cover it with
microscopic bits that need to be cleaned away with dishsoap and/or Comet,
rinsed, and then wiped with a cotton ball wet with acetone. Or 2 or 3 of 4 solvent-soaked cotton balls,
which come away black, even though the metal looks perfectly shiny!
By Sunday I’d gotten much better at cleaning the metal –
considering I only had a few scraps of brass to practice on, and I had to clean
off every horrible failure in order to make my next attempts.
I learned to use finer grit sandpaper to rough up the
surface just enough to give it some tooth, but not scratch so deep that the
toner to bleeds into the grooves.
I’d also discovered a few ironing techniques that seem to
work best; what temperature setting didn’t overheat the toner, how to pre-heat
the metal before laying down the paper and letting it sit there under a steady
iron for awhile so it would stick and not move around, how long it takes to get
the metal hot enough to grab the toner off the paper, how to burnish with the
tip of the iron to make sure the entire image gets stuck to the metal.
Oh, and I realized that all of my designs are not, in fact, bilaterally symmetrical,so reversing the image is essential if I want my Om symbol to be facing the right direction. Derp!
Oh, and I realized that all of my designs are not, in fact, bilaterally symmetrical,so reversing the image is essential if I want my Om symbol to be facing the right direction. Derp!
It’s kind of crazy how many little things can go wrong, and
I think I must have experienced all of them.
But by Sunday night, I was getting an almost-perfect
transfer. Not quite perfect yet, but I
will get there.
At that point, I set up my electro-etching bath to see if I
could take the next step and make those toner images into impressions on the
metal.
You can etch metal with acid, but after doing some research,
I decided I was more comfortable with the saltwater and electricity method,
which I already had all the materials for, and doesn’t involve toxic chemicals.
Yeah…that didn’t go so well, either.
I ended up killing the first power converter. It just died after about 15 minutes. My husband hooked me up with another one,
which is actually better since it has a switch on it, which is much easier to
deal with than plugging and unplugging it.
This one has survived so far.
During my first attempt, I had two pieces of metal in
there. One of them started to etch (and turn copper-colored), the
other didn’t.
Um…why?
Turns out I’d clipped the electric contact onto a part of the
metal covered with tape. D’oh!
After an hour or so, my test pieces had barely etched, and
my saline bath had turned into a completely disgusting sludgepit. Seriously – it looked like the Bog of Eternal
Stench, though fortunately, it did not smell like it.
This is a normal thing – the sludge is made up of all the metal
particles coming off the metal due to the electric current – it’s all SCIENCE
and stuff, you can look it up.
But it looks pretty gross.
And when I checked my last test of the evening, the
alligator clips that suspended the pieces in the solution and served as contact
points had disappeared. They’d just
completely dissolved. O___o
At this point I don’t know why my etching bath didn’t work
right, but I have a couple of ideas.
I forgot to use distilled water, which I read won’t prevent
the etching from happening, but it can decrease efficiency. Our tap water is pretty damn hard – serious calcium
(and whatever else) deposits form on the Cat’s water dish in no time, so I know
there’s gunk in it, which may be effecting things. These chemical reactions are pretty sensitive
to such things, apparently.
I have cleaned out my Bog (not down the sink!) and will make
a new saline solution with the distilled water this time.
I will try a different method of suspending my pieces and
connecting the electrodes (sturdy copper wire should do it).
I have cleaned my new test pieces and replaced the old
masking tape (which maybe was gunking things up…??? I dunno.) that was on the backside with new
packing tape, which is apparently fine.
And I will keep practicing my image transfer until I get
those bitches perfect every time.
One day soon I’ll be totally awesome at this, and I’ll be
using it to make beautiful things.
I can see them in my mind’s eye. Just takes a little more effort to make them
happen in reality. And sometimes a lot of effort!
