Forgive the long post but I have searched in the forum and can not seem to find the answer that I need. I am trying to anodize some antique car parts and I do not know the alloy that they are made of so that is a bit of a hindrance. Please also realize that this was an experiment to see if it would work to some degree before I jumped in this full bore. It seems that I had some success so I think I just need to fine tune some things a bit to get the results that I need. The parts that I am anodizing need to have a high shine and so no dying is needed. I did not have access to any de-oxidizer/de-smut so that may be some of the problem too. The part was polished to a high shine which looked really nice before I anodized it, now it looks dull and flat almost like a gray primer paint with a little shine to it. I hope that there is a way to get some shine to these part and that there is something I did wrong. But this was my first try with what I had available, hope that there is some out there in this forum that can point me in the right direction. Below are the parameters of what I used and what was done.
Part was polished to a high shine with buffer and went down to the white compound from Caswell's
Part was washed/degreased in Castrol Super clean solution and did pass the water break test (I was also wearing nitrile gloves)
Did not have de-ox/de-smut so this was not done.
Bath temp was 63 def F
Part was placed in anno bath for 84 minutes as determined by the 720 calculator Part size 55.75 sqin .7 mil thickness Amperage was set to 5 on the rectifier. This may have been were I went wrong.
Pulled out the part and scratched my head cause it looks like ****.
The anno bath was 3 gallons distilled water and 1 gallon battery acid. There were bubbles coming off of the connection point on the part and on the GP plates in the bath, but none on the part itself that I could see. I did have to use a stainless steel screw and nut to secure the wire to the part. I know, not good, but that was the only way I was not able to find any aluminum connectors this weekend.
It did seem to anodize because there is no continuity on the part when checked with a multi-meter.
Thanks in advance for any help that anyone can she on what I need to fix.
All the pictures can be seen here a few are below.
Anno Pictures
