The Armour Archive

Can street sign Aluminum be normalized after it has work hardened? I have a project it would be perfect for but don't think I can complete it in one pass without cracking due to work hardening.

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The artisan formerly known as Willing Pell, then Juan Santell and then Willing Pell again. Hey, Prince could do it, why not me?

Work the aluminum hot.

If you have oxy/acet welding equipment it's easy. Set the tourch to a rich flame and put a coating of soot over the are you want to aneal. Once the area's covered set the tourch to a neutral flame and heat the sooty area just until the soot burns off. the are's now anealed. You can repeat this if your doing alot of work on the piece and it hardens again.

Be careful with the heating! Unlike steel aluminum doesn't change color as it gets hot it just gets shiney and then goes liquid kind of like solder.

The process that Cet describes works quite well, and I'll reiterate the caution against overheating; aluminum rapidly goes from solidus to liquidus with little warning. It's possible to tell a glow when you are in a low-light area, but under normal conditions, your work suddenly just slags down. I'll also note that when aluminum has been fully annealed it quite soft, quite amazingly so when compared to how hard and springy it is once it's been work hardened. It doesn't stay in that state long, since aluminum has an 'aging' property where it essentially hardens as it ages, but for the first few months it's almost too soft to use as armour (in my opinion at least.) (If you want to know more about why this happens, a search of the web will answer your questions.)


Frederich