Recent content by James_CX

Complete and safely back on the bike. I ended up filling the text again with a black ceramic pen (the sort you can use to draw on a coffee cup) which worked really well.

Do have a go, it’s quite fun seeing the design slowly appear. I’m sure there’s a perfect ratio of water to salt but I just used a fist-full of dishwasher granules and it worked fine!

The finished result. I tried using a buffing wheel to remove the extra paint but it took most of the fill away too, although I quite like the effect on the logo. For the flag I refilled the colours and once dry buffed off the excess with a bit of course cloth on a block. This didn’t dip into the...

I then filled the design with modelling paint and put it on the radiator to dry.

20 minutes later and the design is nicely engraved on the surface. I’d guess it’s about 0.5mm deep so you’d need to be careful on something with not much wall thickness. EDIT just measured with calipers and it’s only 0.25mm deep!

Then it went into an electrolyte solution which is just tap water and dishwasher salt. The negative terminal of a car battery was attached to some old copper pipe and dunked in the solution. The positive terminal was attached to the cranks making sure only the section to be etched went below...

The etching process will attack any exposed metal so the rest was carefully masked with electrical tape. I used this because it’s waterproof, stretchy and sticks to itself well.

Next up was to stick the masks onto the cranks. These were already polished back to bare aluminium so didn’t need any further treatment. The electroetching process won’t work if there’s anodising left on there.

I thought the polished Veloce Ultratorque cranks on my Bianchi looked a bit plain so I decided to try electroetching a design on them. First up was to draw the Campagnolo logo in Illustrator and cut it out in vinyl masking material using my Cricut machine. I always cut a couple of spares!

I thought the carbon cranks were all Ultratorque. Powertorque is fine but you do need a bearing puller when it comes to removal, a crank puller won’t work. They’re dirt cheap from Toolstation but you need to grind some bits off!

A nice new head badge from H Lloyd. I bought an off the shelf decal from them but the artwork was quite poor. They replaced it for free with one from my own artwork file, based on the original. Great service from them.

I’ve been using this quite a bit as a single speed, so off go all the redundant braze-ons and on goes a new coat of paint. The carbon forks came with a Bianchi frame I bought recently. The Deda logos in red were sanded off and the inside faces of the forks painted to match the frame.

My version of Celeste is more vibrant than the original but it bares a better family resemblance to my modern Sprint which hangs next to it (although the modern bike is more luminous). The original paint was heavily affected by 35 year old yellow lacquer, which made it look greener than it...

And another. This one is on clear backing but still very opaque, quality work from H Lloyd

Another decal redrawn by me. Excuse the scuffs on the BB cup, I’ve never failed to mark these when installing. The Campagnolo engineer damages the cup on their official instruction video, so it’s not just me!