Well after hitting Radio Shack again I got the board all finished up and when I hook the battery up no caps blow up, that’s a good thing. So now it’s on to making the faceplate as most of the sound generator is controlled by the pots that are mounted on it. The brass that I am going to use for the faceplate showed up yesterday and I think that I may have gone a bit to thick. The plate I got is 14ga or about 1/16th of an inch think. So the 2 sq ft sheet I have weights in at 7lbs or so. Now the next trick is going to be cutting it up into the sizes I need.
To get the design on to the plate I am going to use a electro-chemically etching processes that I learned about from von Slatt over at The Steampunk Workshop. Basically it’s electroplating but in reverse, using the current to remove metal instead of adding. I’ve already got the Copper Sulfate Pentahydrate (CuSO4 5H2O) to use in the etching solution. You can pick it up at most any hardware store, it is used as a herbicide for septic systems (it is banned in some parts of California however). Now just waiting on the etching mask to show up to do some test etching next week before doing the final panel.
