Meeting Minutes July 19, 2014

EAA Chapter 1167

Old Business:

• Mission to NJ to collect Mr. Dey’s Thunder Gull postponed to Sept. to avoid the heat but before it gets too cold.

New Business:

• No new business discussed.

Tech talk:

we experimented with Anodizing Aluminum. The process is rather simple and rather forgiving because we achieved acceptable result in the parking lot even though we short cut every step. You can find ample demonstrations on YouTube. Although he is hard to listen to, this is a good view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI-oiBKAyOY

In our example we used RITZ fabric color from Food Lion. Our battery acid was 1:5 ratio with COLD water. We did not polish smooth our sample other than rub any varnish off with OOOO steel wool and then we sprayed it with "LA Awesome" from the Dollar Store for our degreaser. We used a 12 car battery to cook the oxidize sample in the acid bath for 15 minutes rather than 1 hour. It sat in the cold die solution (1 pinch RITZ: 1 pint water) for 5 minutes rather than 30 minutes. And we sealed the anodize in warm water for only a few minutes rather than boiling hot water.

Just to see it we could cover Ron's scratches, we treated it again for 5 minutes and the scratched disappeared, so recoating is not a problem. It is a good idea to keep a bucket of Baking Soda water hand to wash up any acid spills.

In summary, we did nothing correctly and our sample was evenly anodized and held up to Ron's Scratch Test. Had our sample been polished in the beginning and buffed evenly, it would have been a much nicer result.

Oh .. for the rusted pliers I was going to throw away; they are back in my tool box. I used the 12 volt battery method of electrolysis with 1 Tbls of Arm & Hammer WASHING POWER (not baking soda) to 1 gallon of water. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDNtPO39PuI Be careful with this the hydrogen bubbles are explosive so use a fan.

Caswells, Inc. http://www.caswellplating.com/ has a lot of supplies for these endeavors but I am going to stick with RITZ. This was an interesting meeting and I appreciate all those attended.

Adjourned meeting.