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dv6speed posted:Stainless steel, aluminum, and other metals can be soldered, but will require special fluxes and filler metal alloy. So if I wanted to solder a piece of aluminum to a piece of stainless I'm S.O.L.? Oh well, I guess that's why we have pop-rivets. Anyhow, what do you guys know about metal finishes? I've been working with aluminum a bit this summer and there are a couple of finishes I would like to know about. The first one I believe is just polished:  It's not a mirror finish and it's not a brushed finish. I'd like to know because I've modified that piece (and scratched and scuffed it) and made several new ones and I want to refinish all my parts to look like that one did. I've had some luck with a Scotch-Brite pad but that gives me more of a brushed look. For the curious, it's a speaker with a position sensor mounted in that brown plastic block. It will be used as a fast acting optical delay line for a diagnostic tool I'm making (measures the shape and length of a laser pulse). Here's the remade sensor mount:  There's a slot cut in the speaker mount that guides the horizontal piece left/right and the vertical piece only slides up/down, that way you can adjust each direction independently (something the old mount didn't have... what a pain!). And here's the rest of the pieces. The second one is a "frosted" or matte finish (don't know what to call it) and almost looks like a flat paint. I'd just like to know the basics of how it's done, I don't intend to try to reproduce it.
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Aug 2, 2008 02:57
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RealKyleH posted:Thanks! Sounds like a lot of work. I'll probably just do the sensor/speaker mounts to a near mirror finish. Since were on the subject, how is a brushed finish done? Is a wire brush used or something less aggressive like a scotch brite pad? Also, after the final polishing step for a mirror finish do you need to apply any coating to protect it from oxidation? It would suck to do all that only to have it turn dull gray.
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Aug 2, 2008 06:14
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dv6speed posted:Edit2: Keep an eye on this thread for useful info: http://www.hobartwelders.com/weldtalk/showthread.php?p=332337#post332337 Wow, that's more involved than I want to do. I was wanting to attach a ss-washer to an aluminum strip but I'm going to rethink that now. Thanks for the info, those papers were quite interesting to read. I never would have guessed that iron and aluminum react to for an brittle intermetallic compound and that is the reason bonding them is so difficult. Of course, if you're NASA you just coat the stainless with titanium and braze away! Metal working is such a fun subject.
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Aug 2, 2008 20:00
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