Aging an aluminum enclosure and metal parts?

[therecordingart]

I've been reading around on ways to age aluminum and other metals, but wanted to see if you guys have any experience with this? I want my jacks, switch, and enclosure to look old and abused. I've read that vinegar will age aluminum as well as ammonia. I know that ammonia works great to patina brass, but I don't want to start a chemistry lesson without consulting others that may have tried it.

I think doing the switch may be tricky.

[Skruffyhound]

100g copper sulphate
100g table salt
1/2 liter hot water
mix
add half a liter hot water
This will eat your aluminium case pretty efficiently, if thats the kind of old pitted, etch surface you are looking for.
It may even take a bite out of your steel parts, it can eat cold rolled mild steel well, other types may be affected but just not digested so heavily. You may have to manually remove some chrome to get some action out of it, but I don't know much about chrome.

[therecordingart]

Awesome! I'll have to looking into copper sulphate.

[5thumbs]

Awesome! I'll have to looking into copper sulphate.

Just pickup some powdered root killer at your local hardware store.  Stuff I've seen has 99% (by weight) copper sulfate content.

[glops]

Use search function and look up copper plating.  John Lyons has a great copper plating tutorial and pics.  Here's my result:



Here's another that I did.  I put some old pennies in some vinegar and then added salt and let it sit for a few hours.  Then I took the pennies out and put the washers in and left them for a few hours.  The enclosure was a failed copper coating attempt.  Sanded the copper off and got an aged greyish aluminum.  This picture ain't great,

[therecordingart]

Meh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF1ls-v7puQ&feature=related