Although not quite Star Wars or lightsaber related, the lessons learned still apply.
I have two Starbucks brand steel insulated coffee cups. They are 16 oz, and are straight cylinders. Despite washing them by hand, the paint started chipping. This past fall they got to the point where they looked pretty bad, so I decided to strip all the paint, and etch designs into them. After a little Google-fu, I found that the techniques in ARKM's tutorial should work on stainless steel.
I fired up my wife's Cricut machine to make some stencils, and used packing tape for the remainder of the resist. I didn't have a long steel bar for the negative side, so I used a straightened staple. It ended up being about 5" long.
The etching seemed to work fine. I got bubbles, and the water turned really gross. So gross, that I couldn't really see the progress. After about 9 minutes, I decided I had waited long enough. I pulled the first cup out of the mix, and rinsed it off. All the areas seemed to be etched, so I pulled off the resist. I found that it was etched, but not as much as I wanted, and the back side didn't get etched much at all. I remembered that the most etching would be on the face close to the negative pole, so for the second cup, I decided I needed to leave it in longer, and turn it so the different faces faced the negative pole. Since I was leaving it longer and turning it, I went from 9 minutes to 27 minutes, and I rotated the cup a little every few minutes.
At the end, I pulled the cup, and water came pouring out of one side, I got a nice deep etch this time, but in a few spots, the etch was too deep and etched completely through.
Looking back, I should have been checking it a little more carefully by rinsing it part way through.
From my recollection, aluminum etched faster, so I could see the same thing happening when etching a saber body.
Lessons learned:
-the face of the part closest to the negative lead etches the fastest
-you can etch completely through the part
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