Electro-lytic-tronic Dance Dance Southern Champion
This write up is for a Championship belt I produced just recently for a company in Mississippi: The Southern Heavyweight Championship
They specifically requested working one of the other plate designs into this, so I knew off the bat, the main plate would have to support a 6 inch plate round center plate. this with oval side plates with liberty bell features on an electric blue strap
So. thats what I started with. did my own hand at trying vector graphics and shot the file over to my partner who corrected my errors ( she sighs a lot. I think I give her headaches) and got me a very nice vinyl mask
For the base of this I chose 16guage steel since they didn't want it chromed, and this would be easy to clean and keep shiny
So after this it was applied and set into the bath for Electrolytic Etching.
Electrolytic Etching; is when you use a resist, such as the vinyl design here(could be paint as well) and apply that to a piece of metal. Then connect to the positive end of a Battery charger (12Volt, 10Amp) to that piece and then submerged into a solution of salt water (non iodized salt and water). The negative end is is attached to a scrap piece of metal. This promotes the exposed metal from your design to "rust" off and etch the design into the plate. Very cheaply, and enviromentally friendly. There is a very unfriendly way, but thats for another post
Check out the video. You can see the chemical reaction
The reaction causes the water to get scummy, but it doesn't interfere with the process.
Then you end up with plates like this:
Pretty swank. Cut them out with a jigsaw, then I got Createx Irridescent Electric Blue for the leather strap. Put some measurements and tooling on the leather, and finished it off with silver snaps, and purple suede backing
Hope you had as much fun reading this as I did making this. Onto the next project
They specifically requested working one of the other plate designs into this, so I knew off the bat, the main plate would have to support a 6 inch plate round center plate. this with oval side plates with liberty bell features on an electric blue strap
So. thats what I started with. did my own hand at trying vector graphics and shot the file over to my partner who corrected my errors ( she sighs a lot. I think I give her headaches) and got me a very nice vinyl mask
For the base of this I chose 16guage steel since they didn't want it chromed, and this would be easy to clean and keep shiny
So after this it was applied and set into the bath for Electrolytic Etching.
Electrolytic Etching; is when you use a resist, such as the vinyl design here(could be paint as well) and apply that to a piece of metal. Then connect to the positive end of a Battery charger (12Volt, 10Amp) to that piece and then submerged into a solution of salt water (non iodized salt and water). The negative end is is attached to a scrap piece of metal. This promotes the exposed metal from your design to "rust" off and etch the design into the plate. Very cheaply, and enviromentally friendly. There is a very unfriendly way, but thats for another post
Check out the video. You can see the chemical reaction
The reaction causes the water to get scummy, but it doesn't interfere with the process.
Then you end up with plates like this:
Pretty swank. Cut them out with a jigsaw, then I got Createx Irridescent Electric Blue for the leather strap. Put some measurements and tooling on the leather, and finished it off with silver snaps, and purple suede backing
Hope you had as much fun reading this as I did making this. Onto the next project