Jason, as usual, you are very kind to me.
Etching the tang, and this is my first full tang damascus, was what worried me the most - even before starting the search for a profile. It turned out to be not so bad although time consuming and did require patience but worked out great.
I used very simple house hold items, and only a couple of those. I used scotch tape to mask off the tang before painting the top and bottom of scales with finger nail polish. Before that I had covered the face of the scales with duct tape and used the nail poish to seal the tape edges. The bolsters were also resist treated with nail polish and scotch tape was used on the ricasso to mask it from the nail polish. Obviouly, after resist was painted on the scotch tape was removed and the tang and ricasso carefully cleaned of tape residue before etching.
The etching procedure and etching solution was recommended to me by Bruce Bump and it worked very well for me. The only real deviation I made was to use tap water instead of his recommended distalled water.
After etching, and I etched blade to 1/2 bolster length and then the tang afterwards, the steel was scrubbed using 0000 steel wool and running water followed by 1500 grit paper and then allowed to soak in pure house hold amonia for 1 hour to neutralize. After that I soaked the handle in acetone for as long as it took to remove the nail polish. I was fortunate enough to use solid ivory with no cracks for the nail polish to bury into.
The etching solution was 1 part ferric chloride to 3 parts water. I etched 5 minutes and scrubbed and repeated for a total of five times for the blade. The tang was etched one time only for a period of 19 - 20 minutes and the resaon was because I could not scub the tang with steel wool between etchings without cutting away the resist borders. It worked out fine though (thank GOD).
RL
