My Method for Image Transfer for Metal Etching (Tutorial with Photos!)

When I set out to learn to work with imagery on metal, I found a wealth of online resources out there - blog posts and articles and tutorials and videos, some of better quality and usefulness than others.  Everyone had their own favored methods, materials and techniques for various things. 
One of the most varied processes was getting an image transferred to metal, to act as a resist to an etching acid, therefor creating a 3-dimensional design on the metal.
This process is used in jewelry making and other metalwork such as knife making and gunsmithing.  It is also used to make circuit boards.
I searched forums, videos and websites relating to all of these industries, and discovered that getting a good image transfer is tricky - hence the many different ways that folks have devised and tried to do it, involving irons and torches and films and different paper types and solvents and whatnot.
I tried them all, and most of them didn't work very well.  It was frustrating - as many who had come before me had mentioned.
But after weeks of research and experimentation and failing and tweaking techniques and figuring out what actually needed to happen and how I might be able to accomplish that, I finally figured out a way that works for me.
I now add myself to this list of generous Do-It-Yourselfers who are willing to share their secrets on the web.  Below is MY method for transferring an image to non-ferrous metal (ie: copper and brass) for etching with ferric chloride.

First Off: this method involves a LASER printer.  Inkjet won’t work.  Laser toner is actually a kind of plastic powder that is melted onto the paper to create the printed image.   

This transfer method involves printing the toner onto paper, then using heat and pressure to transfer the toner to the metal.

The kind of paper matters.  After trying many different suggestions (including expensive films made especially for this process, which didn’t work very well for me) the one that worked best for me was glossy magazine paper.  This kind of paper is coated with a thin layer of clay compound that effects its sheen, absorbancy, etc.  What makes it good for our purposes is that the coating keeps the laser toner from soaking too much into the paper fibers, which allows it to release from the paper and stick to the metal when re-heated.

The cheaper kinds of glossy magazine, catalog or junk mail paper is best because it is thin and dissolves easily, which is also important.  My best results (and the paper used in this tutorial) has been with Westways magazine – the free membership mag from the Auto Club of America.  I’ve used other kinds of magazines and catalogs as well with good results.

Bonus for being a material that most of us get delivered free to our mailbox every day (even though most of us don’t really want most of it!)!

Find a page that’s mostly white with text (it shouldn’t effect the transfer too much, but it’s easier to see what you’re  doing if it’s a mostly white page) and carefully tear the page out at the crease.

Some folks mention some ways to prevent the mag page from getting jammed in the printer, since most of them aren’t the standard copy paper size.  I haven’t had any trouble with running them through my printer just by setting the mag sheet in the paper tray on top of a small stack of regular copy paper. Make sure it's centered and flush against the top edge of the tray.

I lay out my designs on the computer in Illustrator to fit onto the pieces of sheet metal I’m using. 

So if I have a 3” x 6” piece, I’ll make a 3” x 6” rectangle in my print file, and arrange my designs to fit comfortably within that space, leaving room to cut around each separate design and some space around the edges.

Print Sheet layout example

Remember that your images must be in negative - black parts will protect the metal and leave a raised area (the bright metal surface), while the white parts will be exposed to the acid and will be eaten away to form darker recessed areas.

I can usually fit the image prints for 3 pieces of metal on a single mag sheet.  Also – since the mag sheets are smaller than regular copy paper, keep your images near the center of the sheet, so they don’t print off the edge.

A nice, dark and dense print is what you want, so fiddle with your printer settings to get the highest-density printing you can.

Put your mag paper in your printer and print your image on it.  It will come out with your images printed over the text and stuff on the mag page.

 At this point I cut out my rectangles that are the same size as my metal pieces, and snip off a little bit of two opposing corners.  Ill be using these to secure my paper to the metal in a moment.

CLEAN and SCUFF your metal.  I use a combo of a dab of Dawn dishsoap and a dash of Barkeepers Friend (a powdered metal cleanser/polish) and a piece of brown Scotchbrite to scrub and rough up the metal surface.  Make sure you scrub in different directions and get all the edges – transfer problems seem to happen most often around the edges for whatever reason.
Another note - the edges of the sheet metal I get are often very slightly curled where it was cut.  Use a rawhide mallet to hammer out any curled edges - you want your metal as flat as possible to make even contact with the hot skillet. Yes, I use a skillet instead of an iron - and it has saved my sanity!

When you rinse your metal, the water should sheet off, not bead up.  Make sure any powder residue is gone.  Dry with a clean paper towel.  Now it’s time for paper to get intimate with metal!

Here’s my setup:

Scotch Tape, Cotton Balls, Acetone, Scissors, Pliers, Burnisher, Clean flat skillet, Dish of warm water (I nuke mine for 30 seconds just before I start), Clean metal, Mag paper prints with corners snipped.  Also, you’ll need a sink and a stove.

The only special equipment I use for this is a burnisher my husband built for me out of a scrap of aluminum and a piece of Teflon he ordered.  It has a nice long handle, is heat-resistant and has a curved as well as “sharp” edge on it.  I most often use the curved edge, as it rides more smoothly. 

Ugly, but FUNCTIONAL!!!

You can probably use any kind of heat-resistant burnisher, such as the bone burnishers they make for paper folding, or the wooden ones made for sewing, like This One.

Just be sure it has a flat area on it so you have a nice wide, flat surface to smooth with.  A longer handle also helps, as that skillet gets hot!

The first burnisher I used was made of plastic and started to melt and get sticky and tear the paper. Not good.

Take a cotton ball and squirt some acetone on it and wipe down your metal surface until the cotton ball comes away clean.  Once the acetone has dried (in like 1 second!), place your image print FACE DOWN on the metal.  Use the scissors to cut tiny triangles of Scotch tape and stick those in those snipped corners to tape the paper to the metal.  Try to keep the tape pieces small and not overlapping imagery that needs to be transferred, as this can interfere with the burnishing.

Place your skillet over medium-high heat, set your metal piece PAPER SIDE UP in the center.  Let it sit for about 2 minutes.  The heat will start to curl the free corners of the paper.

After a couple of minutes, use your burnisher to start to smooth the paper down against the metal.  Start at the center where there is contact and smooth out to the curled corners, so you don’t get buckles and folds, or shift the paper across the surface.  The tape should keep it somewhat steady, but the heat will melt the adhesive after awhile.  Use a light touch – you don’t want to press hard, just firmly smooth the paper onto the metal.  You can use your pliers to steady the metal, but make sure you aren’t touching an area with toner under it, or you can scratch it.

At first, your corners will probably curl back up, but eventually, the toner will start to melt and get tacky and your paper will start sticking to the metal.  Once this happens, take your pliers and carefully lift a corner and check to see if the toner is transferring to the metal.

Once you see some of the black sticking to the metal, you know you’re in business.  Continue to burnish over the whole surface, making sure to get those edges, for maybe another minute and a half.  There’s no exact timing on this, but be aware that if things get too hot, the toner can melt too much and blur.  I use a gas stove – no idea about timing for electric or induction stoves.  You’ll have to experiment.

Not yet!

THERE it is!

Carefully grip an empty corner (I have to use the handle end of my burnisher to slide the metal toward the edge of the pan to get it to lift enough to get my pliers in there) and lift your metal (be sure you have a firm grip on it – it’s hot!) and take it to the sink.

Hit the BACKSIDE – the bare metal side – with a shot of cold water from the tap.  Then drop your piece into the dish of warm water, paper side up.

You’ll notice that the paper becomes translucent and starts to puff around the images.  Let it sit for a few minutes to soften up and release.  Then grab a loose corner or edge and gently peel back the paper.  Some papers come off in layers.  Westways seems to peel off beautifully, leaving little behind.  If you're using a thicker paper with layers, peel off a layer and let it soak a bit longer, then peel off some more. 

Eventually you’ll get down to some fibers that are stuck to the toner.  Rub with your thumbs to remove the pulpy stuff – under a running tap can help. 

You don’t have to get all of the fibers off.  Some tiny fibers will remain stuck to the toner, and that’s okay.  As long as your bare metal parts are shiny and fiber-free, it shouldn’t interfere with your etching.

When it dries, you’ll see the fibers as a whitish fuzz on the toner.

At this point you can inspect for flaws.  There are almost always flaws, which can often be corrected.  If it’s really bad, just use your cotton balls and acetone to clean off the toner, wash your metal again and start over.  You’ve only lost a sheet of magazine paper and a few minutes of time – which is good, because it may take you a few tries to get that hang of this. There are a lot of little things that can go wrong to mess it up - but the metal won't get ruined and you can always try again!

Corrections can be made with a Sharpie marker, acrylic paints, or special stuff they make for etch resists.  I like black acrylic paint because I can use a fine brush and correct even intricate parts of a design that have been marred. 

The consistency of acrylics can leave brushstrokes, which can result in an uneven coverage, so I usually do one coat, let it dry and do a second coat to make sure it’s covered.

Another thing I’ve noticed with acrylics is that if I do an etch longer than an hour and a half, the paint begins to dissolve, which can result in shallow patches of etching where you don't want it.  Most of the time it’s shallow enough that it can be sanded out, but be aware that the paint is not quite as durable in the acid bath as the toner is.

For areas where there is toner and there shouldn't be, I use a needle-point tool to gently scratch away the offending bits.

I correct any flaws in the toner coverage that show bare metal, and I also go over any areas where the layer of fibers hasn’t stuck.  These are areas where the toner hasn’t melted quite as much as the rest of it and there’s just a smear of toner on the metal.  I like to reinforce these thin areas with paint as well.

If you’re fixing an edge that’s going to be cut, you can err a bit beyond your cutting line as you’re going to be trimming and finishing those edges anyway.

Once your corrections are dry, cover the back of your metal sheet with some packing tape and you’re ready to etch!

Here's another example, and a quick review:
Oh - a quick note here - if you're doing more than one piece of metal, let the skillet cool between them.  Starting with a hot skillet can cause overheating and melting and blurring and burning and metal discoloration.
So:
Laser print on magazine paper, clean and scuff metal, swipe with acetone, tape paper image-side down onto metal with tape in snipped corners.  Place on cold skillet, heat for 2 minutes over medium-high heat. Edges will curl.

 

Burnish until toner gets sticky, burnish some more. 

 

Check a corner. If toner is sticking to metal, burnish for another minute-minute and a half.

 

Hit the backside with cold water (not shown here) and drop it into warm water to soak.

 

 Peel and rub loose paper off.

As you can see in this example there are some major flaws in this transfer.  I managed to salvage the two earring designs at lower left, cut them out of the sheet, and cleaned the toner off the rest of the metal, which I can use later.

I hope this tutorial is helpful to other self-educators and makers out there!  I want to give special thanks to my husband Dore for taking pictures of this for me, as timing is critical once you get going!  And for making me a custom burnisher that works perfectly. He's the BEST!!!

I also want thank all the bloggers and artisans and YouTubers out there in InternetLand who have shared their knowledge, with special mention for Nancy Hamilton, who has a bunch of videos on YouTube on jewelry making; tools, materials, equipment and projects.  I kind of love her.  :)  Check out her videos here:
In The Studio with Nancy Hamilton

That's all for now!

Cranking Through the Failures to Get to Success!

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!

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!