Help with etching

Wayne Bensinger

Well-Known Member
Good evening all, wondering if anybody out there in Knifedogland can help me out with a problem I just had. Here's the details. I ordered two stencils from The Boss and could not wait for Friday night to get here to have some time to try them out on some of my older and more recent work. The unit I have is a Monode 400CC solid state power unit.(supposedly a industrial etching unit). So I started by cleaning the blade with Windex and then taping the stencil to the blade, so far so good, or so I thought! I set the etcher to DC and used what I thought was a middle of the road setting and got no results at all after holding the pad on for 60 seconds. I thought I had some etch, but when I rubbed it with my thumb it was appparently just the stencil debris that was fried. This was the 52100 stencil if anyone is wondering about the steel. Tried again with 154CM, same results. I would think that if I had my settings to high that I would fry two stencils, at least I might get some type of permanent mark on either piece of steel, but not the slightest mark! Anything that was on the blade after my attempts just rubbed right off with my thumb, at this point spending $60 on a stamp seams a much better way to mark, if at all. Please help
 
I can try and help but need more info. How many Volts were you using? Was there a ground wire attached to the blade from the etching unit? What etching solution did you dampen the etching pad with?
 
Thanks for trying to help, I've attached a picture of the power unit but I don't have any other details bout it. Nothing is written on any tags or plates that are attached to the unit. Just some dials that go from 0.2 up to 2.0 not sure if this is a volts reading or not, I think it's a time measurement. The electrolyte is SC-44 from USA Knifemaker. I built a small galvanized plate for the blade to sit on and the opposite lead has a felt pad held in place by a rubber band. Thank you, not sure what else I can give you that may help.

Wayne
 

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Your plate should be hooked to your positive jack and your pad to your negative jack. For a DC etch you want the current to flow from the blade to the pad. You have your pad hooked to the proper place but obviously your plate is hooked to them wrong place. I don't know which jack it should be plugged into but you can figure it out with a volt meter.
It looks like this machine can control the pulse function which would be handy to have. Apparently you cannot change the voltage but you can control the amps (current) that is allowed to be drawn. I can't read the labels of the three buttons on the left and I don't know what the monode jack is for. Apparently you don't have any instructions for this machine. I googled Monode , here is their phone number (440) 975-8802, give them a call,maybe they can help.
 
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