Copper Activation! Or... How Not To Load Your HCL With Copper!
Copper activation is super easy! Every alloy you treat the same!
Heat treated and polished alloys never require a different process!
Right? Right?!?
Not right... In fact very wrong!
Activating copper can be very easy and for some shops all you need is a hydrochloric dip and off you go. But... If you run a lot of copper... and a lot of steel... and you only have 1 HCL tank...
Then even this standard process gets tougher as you turn steel pink and have adhesion failures.
Not great!
If you have heat treated copper that has a baked on black scale and needs extra activation, using the same HCL for everything can attack the copper as the heat scale comes off unevenly and something that was once bright and shiny is now spotted and etched in certain areas. Wait till you nickel plate that mess!
And talking about etching and heat treating, do we treat heat treated beryllium the same way we treat CDA 110 copper or tellurium copper? You better not!
So there are options and other "solutions" that can help.
We have multiple processes and products that can help activate copper depending on the alloy, the heat treatment even the polishing and critical surface conditions.
• Need something aggressive for a copper that can be etched? We have that.
• Have a heat treated beryllium that needs to have the scale removed BUT can't be etched? We can help!
• Need a process for tellurium that keeps it from being ruined in cleaning and activation? Yup... There's a process and very big red flag you need to be aware of.
So all copper is not the same. HCL is good but there are options and products available that in many cases are simple and easy to put in. A small tank (dare I say bucket?), a room temp solution, something that is easier, safer and may help prolong the life of your HCL. It's all available.
And now... A story!
For those of you who know me well you'd be shocked if in fact I didn't have a story to go along with this subject. Well good news, I do!
I was given a part from a customer to try and clean.
• Beryllium Copper
• Torch Brazed
• Naval Brass Flange
• Flange Face machined and polished after brazing exposing bright yellow brass.
So beryllium copper torched black and exposed brass machined and polished smooth. Make it tougher why don't you! How do you remove the heavy scale and beryllium oxide from the part without etching / attacking the highly critical sealing surface of the flange face?
Being fearless we took a sample part and after soak cleaning it well, we put it into the Isoprep 161 many of you may be familiar with. This product cleans and activates and even descales but we were a little nervous about the time we need to be in there and the exposed brass subsequently being attacked.
Being the careful technician I am, I put the part into the Isoprep 161, we all started talking and promptly forgot about it. Yeah the conversation and company were good!
After 15 minutes I realized how much time had passed and pulled the part out quickly. The beryllium was completely scale free. The naval brass flange machined to such a high quality surface condition? Pristine and still polished. Some may say we got lucky but no.. This was by design and we chose a product that we were confident would do what we needed to do.
So let's talk copper activation!
How can we help? Throw your worst nightmare at us and let's see if we can maybe find a way to activate it better, cheaper and faster. And safer! Safer for you of course and... Safer for the part!