This is hard to appreciate with pictures and the glare from the scanner has pretty much obliterated some areas of the knife but you can get the idea from the pics. The whole of the liners and clip is purple/blue in color and quite attractive.
I anodized the liners and the pocket clip of my Spyderco Salt that I rebuilt the body on in a very primitive but effective way. I did it with three 9 volt batteries using homemade jumper cables and crimping alligator clips to both ends of them. Each jumper cable is about 8" long and the two for doing the anodizing are about 12" long. Each wire (four in all) has rubber coated alligator clips and an alligator clip on each end.
I ran the 9 volt batteries in series by clipping the first jumper to the positive terminal of one battery. Then I took the other end of that jumper and clipped it to the negative of the second battery. Then I took the next jumper wire and hooked it from the postive of the second battery to the negative on the third. Using the remaining clip installed wires I hooked on to the negative on the first battery and one to the positive on the third.
I then poured some diet coke in a glass bowl and clipped a scrap piece of titanium to the negative and dunked it in the coke. Then I thouroughly cleaned the titanium I wanted to color with acetone. When it dried in a few seconds I clipped the pocket clip to the positive jumper and dunked it in. Within seconds it turned to a very attractive brilliant purple color. I then reclipped the other end and dunked the second half of the clip. Both sides were anodized in a few seconds time. I then did the liners on the folder the same way. Total time was about 10 minutes once I got it all set up.
This was so easy it makes me wonder why anodizers sell for as much as they do. You don't need all that gadgetry to make a working unit. I mean a read out and a power light is all nice and everything but it is not needed to get the job done. With a block of wood some scrap wire and some rubber gloves you can do it yourself in minutes. Just take precautions to make sure the work area is dry, and that you have your feet grounded and rubber gloves on.
The color changes according to the voltage run through the metal. You could theoretically run as many 9 volt batteries as you wanted in series but anything above about 40-50 volts starts to get into the dangerous shock potential where it could actually stop a heart if it bites you. So four batteries is about as far as I would go with this method unless you took extra precautions to insulate and make sure of safety measures before proceeding.
If you try it later with some titanium and use the towel method or brush method by soaking a paper towel or a small brush in Coke it works well for making a specified pattern to just a small specific area. You have to touch the clip to the wet towel draped over the metal or arrange the cut out paper pattern you pre-made after soaking it and then hit it with the current to the area you want to cover in a color pattern by anodizing.
So, just hooking an alligator clip to the wet towel is not going to do anything. I would imagine for making some custom shields for knife handles and ear rings or other small parts that this would be a great thing to start doing.
For the clip and separate parts where you don't need to do a pattern the dunk is better suited and also much faster. If you do try the towel method, clip one alligator clip to the part you are coloring and use the other to touch the wet rag or pattern draped or set on the metal and check the metal after doing the pattern. If it worked you have it hooked up right if not you need to reverse the alligator clips by hooking the one you were using to touch the metal to the part and then use the one you had clipped to do the touching. It either works immediately or it doesn't. It is fun to do also.
I will be doing another set of liners here shortly on a folder I just started. That will be in another thread later on. Stay tuned.
Steve
Oh yeah. You can see more on this here at this link.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/3f178ca927d05010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
NOTE: if this link doesn't work copy and paste the whole address in your browser.
It is an article on anodizing using 9 volt batteries. In this write up the author did a titanium birdhouse. The article came out in Popular Mechanics but it did not go into as much detail as you really need to know to get it done. I think I filled in the gaps for anyone wanting to try it.
Steve
