Tin Plating

 At Quelab on the 4th of July, Adric tin-plated a piece of copper as part of the "fireless fireworks" demonstration -- repeating the experiment on Hackaday.

Adric asked me to draw something on a small copper plate with a crayon.  The crayon wax strokes acted as a "mask," shielding the copper from being tin-plated.  That is how we used chemistry to make ART!

I drew this image on copper

with the dark green crayon pictured on the left

I used Bill as a model

Adric showing a lump of tin

which he added to the solution

Adric also added Tarn-X to the solution

Then he dropped the copper plate into the solution

The result after several minutes in solution,

covered in crystals

The result all cleaned up

I wonder if there is any way to make a print from the resulting plate.  Maybe there is an ink that sticks to copper, but not to tin (or vice-versa).  Perhaps we could just drop the plate into ferric chloride and etch it (though we could do that immediately after drawing on the plate with crayon, so there is not really an advantage to tin-plating).