Gator piss: what do you think of it?

weo said:
Is this food safe? Personally, I wouldn't use this on kitchen knives....
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Yeah I definitely would not use WD-40 on kitchen knives lol. But you could use mineral oil or axe wax or beekeeper's gold, something like that. I guess for oxide setting you'd need to use mineral oil in a spray bottle or something so you don't rub any of the oxides off when you apply it.
 
Leon Husock said:
Looks like it actually does say it on the SDS after all (or at least it says the maximum amount, >8% hydrochloric, >5% ferric chloride, >1% iron dichloride). It also says the shelf life is 6 months, which is wild to me considering I've been using the same PVC tube of ferric for a couple years now with no loss in efficacy. But it's good to know that they're not just selling pre-mixed ferric.
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FWIW - There are online recipes for making your own ferric chloride. The first step is to dissolve steel wool in muriatic (aka hydrochloric) acid. This yields a green solution of ferrous chloride (aka iron dichloride) which is then converted to ferric chloride (aka iron trichloride) by adding hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer. This turns the solution into that familiar brown color. The two forms will exist in an equilibrium that can be driven either way by adding more acid or peroxide. Based on the color description the boys at Gator Piss have formulated their product to drive it a bit more towards the ferrous by bumping up the HCl ratio.
It looks like a 1:8 dilution of ferric chloride with around 10% HCl rather than water.
 
Ben Thomas said:
Based on the color description the boys at Gator Piss have formulated their product to drive it a bit more towards the ferrous by bumping up the HCl ratio.
It looks like a 1:8 dilution of ferric chloride with around 10% HCl rather than water.
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Can you elaborate on the comment....."rather than water"?
 
FC is normally mixed with water. They use 10% HCl instead of water to make the 1:8 ratio ... 1 part FC and 8 parts dilute Hydrochloric acid.
 
I bought a gallon of the GP Heavy during the pre-order sale. I've been using it to darken some AEB-L neck knives before stonewashing and have been getting really good results. I typically just use it at room temp and etch for 2 or 3 minutes followed by a dunk into a distilled water and baking soda mixture.

I doubt you'd need a doctorate in chemistry and a DARPA level laboratory to make the stuff, and a I'm sure any one of us could mix our own relatively easily. If I needed 10 gallons of the stuff, I probably would, but I don't see myself spending the extra time, energy and mess just to save $10 or $20 when I only need the gallon.
 
Food safe is not an issue. The knife will be washed and neutralized after etching. Oiling with a food grade oil would be done like any kitchen knife.

As a former research chemist:
Pretty much everything that we use to make a knife is not "food safe". But we clean them up and remove the contaminates. Porous surfaces and woods that can soak up liquids are much more of a worry. Besides chemicals, bacteria can get in those places. I would worry far more about that than the chemicals used to etch a blade.
 
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