Anodizing 101: Anodizing Design Guidelines (Aluminum Anodizers Council)
Aluminum Anodizers Council
The Aluminum Anodizers Council's technical primer on anodizing aluminum: bath chemistry and operating parameters, which alloy series anodize well, coating type and class designations, mechanical and chemical pre-finishes, colour control, and quality-assurance testing.
More resources on Metal Finishing
Products Finishing
Trade publication covering the surface finishing industry since 1936: electroplating, anodizing, powder coating, pretreatment chemistry and coating troubleshooting, with an Ask the Expert archive. Useful for current shop practice, process problems and supplier landscape.
Spare Parts #12 — Heat Bluing A Set Of Steel Clock Hands
Chris of Clickspring polishes and heat-blues steel clock hands, demonstrating why surface preparation and absolute cleanliness determine the final oxide colour, how a brass-chip tray spreads heat evenly, and how patchy or uneven bluing happens. The best filmed demonstration of the polish-then-oxidise sequence at a level of surface preparation almost no other channel reaches.
The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals
A manual of tested recipes and working procedures for chemically colouring cast bronze, brass, copper, gilding metal, silver and plated surfaces, giving solution compositions, application methods, surface preparation requirements and notes on durability and sealing.
ASM Handbook, Volume 5: Surface Engineering
ASM International's thousand-page reference covering surface cleaning, grinding and polishing, shot peening, electroplating, phosphate and chromate conversion coatings, anodizing, thermal spray, CVD and PVD, plus coating testing and characterization, with extensive process-parameter tables. Its table of contents maps almost exactly onto this topic — mechanical finishing, plating, conversion coatings including anodizing, and coating evaluation — under one covering framework rather than as disconnected how-tos. Nothing free matches its coverage or data density.
MIL-A-8625F — Military Specification: Anodic Coatings for Aluminum and Aluminum Alloys
The US military specification governing anodic coatings on aluminum, defining six types and two classes with thickness, coating weight, corrosion-resistance and sealing requirements. The document nearly every anodizing shop and drawing callout references. Free PDF.
finishing.com — The Finishing Hotline Q&A Archive
A free, unpaywalled archive of roughly 60,000 practitioner threads on electroplating, anodizing, galvanizing, powder coating and PVD, answered since 1989 by working shop chemists, platers and consultants. The reference for diagnosing real finishing defects. The Q&A format captures the failure modes — bath contamination, adhesion loss, burning, staining — that textbooks and trade magazines skip.