Electropolishing fluid for stainless steel

A. Electropolishing does not necessarily involve complex proprietary solutions, although those are available too. Simple chemicals like high concentration sulfuric and/or phosphoric acids can be used, but they are not necessarily "safe". See Durney's Electroplating Engineering Handbook [on AbeBooks or eBay or Amazon affil links] for a good compilation of the various formulations.

If you can't get basic industrial chemicals like these acids, you're probably out of luck.

A. There are thousands of variations of mixtures and temperatures for electropolishing SS. There also is no single formulation that will work best for all SS. I would quite strongly recommend that you buy or rent a very good book on the subject before investing in acids , tanks, racks, lab equipment and power supplies. Ted's book recommendation is a beginning only. Try a search for electropolishing and Faust. Faust had several in depth publications and magazine articles, but they are like 20 years old.

A. Faust may have written a book on it, Jim, I don't know, but I do remember his series on the subject in Metal Finishing magazine.

----

Ed. note 10/22/04:

We don't think there is a whole book on electropolishing in print anymore, but you can get a used copy of Tegart's "The Electrolytic And Chemical Polishing of Metals".