I have been hacking on some cheap R/C cars, lately, and wanted to etch metal films off of a few of the bits. I knew that the usual strong acid and base suspects would remove it, but many folks don’t keep these substances around, for whatever reasons. I got curious about milder etchants, and did a simple test with some household chemicals.
Metallography is a method of materials analysis used to characterize the microscopic structure of a metal sample. Generally, the process involves cutting a sample from some object of interest, polishing its surface to high smoothness, and etching it with a chemical agent to highlight grain boundaries, inclusions, and other microstructural features. The sample is then imaged using one of a number of types of microscopy. The resulting pictures are often strikingly (if incidentally) beautiful. That’s OK by me, personally—incidental beauty is usually my favorite kind.
As promised, here’s a tasting menu featuring some of my favorite metallurgical content from our archives arranged, as usual, in mysteriously-appealing (and entirely arbitrary) top-ten format. Narrowing it down to just ten involved some hard choices; this subject is rich, and we’ve covered it a lot. A second round-up, perhaps at the close of the month, may be in order. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of cool stuff on my to-blog list, and it’s growing fast as your suggestions roll in.
Well, what’s left of August is Metals Month, I should say. A broad subject, to be sure, and with only a couple of weeks to explore it, I want to be fairly ruthless about focusing on interesting and unusual metals themselves, and processes for working with them, rather than more general “cool stuff made from metal.”
