- Joined
- Sep 19, 2017
- Messages
- 1,612
For people who get serious about anodizing titanium, there comes a point where they start to ask themselves if they should be using Multi-Etch instead of Whink, because the latter is extremely harsh and it strips off the surface finish of the titanium. Multi-Etch manages to remove the oxide layer from titanium but also preserves the surface finish -- or so we were all told.
I started off with Whink and progressed to Multi-Etch, and my experience is that Multi-Etch is better because it acts slower, but it can still easily ruin a surface finish and often does. In particular, if you are rolling back colors with Multi-Etch, the surface finish is often ruined for at least one of two reasons: (1) If the colors are inconsistent on the knife because of an anodizing job that didn't go well, it takes longer for the higher voltage colors (the thicker anodization layers) to strip off than it takes for the lower voltage colors to strip off, but you have to keep your part in Multi-Etch until all of the color is off, leading to harsh results on what used to be the parts that had a thinner anodization coating, since the bare titanium underneath was exposed longer to Multi-Etch, and (2) It's difficult to tell exactly when you complete the transition from early bronze all the way back to bare titanium, since the color change is gradual, and in that brief time, your surface is exposed too long to the Multi-Etch, ruining its finish.
I haven't read any other accounts of people having results with Multi-Etch where their surface finish got stripped, so I may be doing something wrong. But maybe no one has wanted to say anything until now because they've been thinking they're alone in getting mediocre results from an expensive product.
What's more, I have an untested hypothesis that if we watered down our Whink to 1 part Whink to 9 parts water, Whink would function almost exactly like Multi-Etch. I hope to buy some Whink in the next couple of weeks to try test this hypothesis. (If 1:10 is too strong, I'll just try again with 1:30.)
I welcome the thoughts of others who have used both products enough to compare their results between the two, as well as any practices they discovered to product better results.
I started off with Whink and progressed to Multi-Etch, and my experience is that Multi-Etch is better because it acts slower, but it can still easily ruin a surface finish and often does. In particular, if you are rolling back colors with Multi-Etch, the surface finish is often ruined for at least one of two reasons: (1) If the colors are inconsistent on the knife because of an anodizing job that didn't go well, it takes longer for the higher voltage colors (the thicker anodization layers) to strip off than it takes for the lower voltage colors to strip off, but you have to keep your part in Multi-Etch until all of the color is off, leading to harsh results on what used to be the parts that had a thinner anodization coating, since the bare titanium underneath was exposed longer to Multi-Etch, and (2) It's difficult to tell exactly when you complete the transition from early bronze all the way back to bare titanium, since the color change is gradual, and in that brief time, your surface is exposed too long to the Multi-Etch, ruining its finish.
I haven't read any other accounts of people having results with Multi-Etch where their surface finish got stripped, so I may be doing something wrong. But maybe no one has wanted to say anything until now because they've been thinking they're alone in getting mediocre results from an expensive product.
What's more, I have an untested hypothesis that if we watered down our Whink to 1 part Whink to 9 parts water, Whink would function almost exactly like Multi-Etch. I hope to buy some Whink in the next couple of weeks to try test this hypothesis. (If 1:10 is too strong, I'll just try again with 1:30.)
I welcome the thoughts of others who have used both products enough to compare their results between the two, as well as any practices they discovered to product better results.
