Super Simple Copper Etching — Sylvia’s Mini Maker Show

By Super Awesome Sylvia and her dad, James

Did you ever want to upgrade your bread-boarded circuits to something more permanent? Or maybe you’ve got a hankering to make your own metal jewelry? Today we’ll show you how you can do both. With super simple copper etching. Lets go!

Subscribe to Sylvia’s Mini Maker Show Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.

For this coppertastic build,  we’ll need:

• Eye protection and gloves (rubber/latex/nitrile, any kind will do)
• Ferric chloride etchant (Found at some electronics stores, or online)
• Regular printer paper
• Printable plastic film or really thin glossy magazine pages, and access to a laser printer or copier
• A clothes iron
• Some fine steel wool
• and finally, some paper towels (it gets messy!)

For making jewelry, we’ll also need:

• Some solid pieces of copper or brass (found at fancy art stores)
• and a plastic or glass container than can fit your piece to be etched

For circuit boards, instead we’ll need:

• A copper clad PC board
• A brand new kitchen sponge (for the Sponge etch method pioneered by our friend Jim from TechShop!)

First things first, we need an image. What are we putting on our copper? If you’ve got a circuit design ready in your cad software, export a high resolution monochrome image of just the traces you want, or a high contrast piece of art for your jewelry, carefully print your design out on plastic or magazine paper.

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