Hard anodizing

[El Greco]

This is my first experience with hard anodizing. Just sharing what I learned.

I went to the scrapyard to buy some aluminum tubing and plate to make a pair of supports for my boat. The only round tube I could find was about 6’ long and anodized. Since I easily removed anodizing with Easy-Off before so I bought the tubing.

Come to find out out that oven cleaner will not remove ‘hard’ anodizing. After that rude awakening I took to it with a file and it worked ok. For the second one I tried a 3m disc. Still can’t believe how well this worked, while the oven cleaner would not touch it.

I highly recommend the 3m method, even better than the oven cleaner method.

[welding1]

You can also TIG weld the anodized aluminum tubes, guys that make Tuna towers for boats do it.

[welding1]

It looks like you TIG welded it, the tuna towers are generally anodized pipe. It requires around 200 amps to blast thru the coating, kinda tricky,