How to Plan Your Design for Anodized Finishes - Education Chapter 5 Lesson 15)

There's more than one way to finish your parts. In this lesson, we're going to focus on non-coated finishes and how they improve the appearance and functionality of your parts. So let's get into it. In the last lesson, we went over finishes that add that protective coating to the outside of your parts. Powder coating, the spray cans from Home Depot, that kind of situation ends up adding that thickness that we need to be concerned about with our designs. Now there is other finishing options that don't necessarily add that coating but change the surface of the part. So coming over to the board here, we can start getting into this one. Now these are going to be surface modifications and we're going to be focusing on the main one, anodizing. Now anodizing, what it does is it creates an oxidation layer on the outside of our parts through an electrochemical process. Now that ends up having a corrosion resistance, so aluminum can corrode essentially that oxidation layer on the outside of the parts. You end up seeing some speckling, some corrosion that ends up coming in and it protects it from that. Now unlike those additive processes, it only changes the surface. So we're going to talk about here in a second, it's not necessarily adding any thickness even though it sort of does. We'll go over that here in a minute. Now why do it though? You know aluminum generally speaking is fairly good about staying safe on the outdoor environment, but that chemical corrosion that we end up putting in here ends up protecting us from further oxidation in the future. Now additionally it adds durability, so that oxidation layer that comes on the outside of the part is like hard shell casing that ends up getting put on there and has more wear resistance for us. And there's different types of anodizing. You can have type 2, type 3, and those different types have different hardnesses that are associated with it. Now additionally we have cosmetics, right? So we all want our parts to look really good and match the design that we put into them, and with this they can just add dyes to that chemical process. And it's just like dipping an Easter egg, you know, dyeing an Easter egg, because you're going to dip it into that dye layer. It gets built into that oxidation layer, and now you have your colors, whether it's red, blue, gold, additionally. Now lastly is this oxidation layer is not conductive. So we typically see this really common in electrical components, panels, where you don't want them to be conducting electricity through them. But it's also important to know that because once you do that, welding, you have to grind it out a way to weld them. As well as if you do want that aluminum to be conductive, albeit aluminum is not a great conductor, it's now no longer conductive with that surface finish. Now additionally speaking, this is anodizing is aluminum, right? So we're going to relate those two together. Now there is anodizing processes for titanium. Now titanium gets its color through light and electricity. There's a completely different process there. As well as stainless steel has, we'll call it an anodizing, but not quite. But it's called passivation, where stainless steel naturally has an oxidation layer that's on the outside of it. Passivation essentially removes that, removes the impurities, and then adds a new more robust layer onto it. The next one is carbon steel. So carbon, like high carbon steels, black oxide is traditionally the most well-known one that you're going to see in manufacturing, and that is just adding that oxide layer to the outside of it. So with all of these, we're essentially just removing a coating on the outside and then putting our own specialized coating on the outside that is going to control our atmosphere a little bit better. Now I already touched on no welding, but it's very important, make sure you remove anodizing. It can be toxic as well, so just stay away from that. And here's the big thing I talked about earlier, right? We're not adding that coating, we're not adding thickness through our paint or our powder coating process, but we are going to see it increase the size as that oxidation layer builds onto the outside of it. You're going to see probably an increase of five-tenths of a thou to one-thousandth of an inch. Now when we talk about this, we're talking about like a quarter of a human hair here. And generally speaking, I don't design around the anodizing process, but if you were going to do very special CNC projects where you have press fits that are going to be one and a half thou or a thousandth of an inch of press, then this can essentially directly affect that press fit and increase it. I recommend doing that press fit after, so doing that machining after the anodizing process. Well, that's it here for this. Let's show you how to add anodizing and also powder coating to your parts on ScentCuts.net's website. We're going to use the same part that we used on the last lesson to add hardware. I still even have that hardware in there. I want you guys to remember that anodizing, that hardware is going to get installed after because it will react during the anodizing process versus powder coating. It'll get installed before. Now coming up here, we're in the finishing, so it's the last step of our checkout process on ScentCuts.net's website. Powder coating, we can do the drop-down menu and we can see all the colors that they currently have available. If we select red, we can see that our part turns red as well. Now the hardware doesn't turn red in this image here, but we are going to know that those nuts are going to be red as well. And we can change the color on our part to show all the different surface finishes that we can have from the powder coating process. Now if we want to, we can also select, well not also, we can select anodizing instead of powder coating. If we select blue anodizing, we're going to end up seeing that blue anodizing coming through, gold as well. Now this is actually exactly how the part is going to show up. Hardware is going to be a different color than our actual finished product because that hardware is installed after. Now that we select the part color and the finish that we want, we can click done and add it to our cart. So that is it actually for the entire educational part of our Chapter 5. The next two lessons are going to focus on a capstone project where we're going to take everything from Chapter 1 through 5 and put it into one assembly that we're going to design together to kind of sum everything up. So we'll see you on the next one.