Does anybody have any personal experience on anodizing bead blasted titanium. I’m getting perfect color on a titanium Triton, The problem I’m experiencing, once it’s dry the second you touch it, it smudges. It’s like it’s collecting the oils off my fingers. It turns every spot you touch into a dull darker color. I really feel like this has to do with the bead blasting. I can take windex, clean off clean it off and 90% of it goes away but it leaves a small spot. I’ve successfully anodized a few things, this is the first time I’ve tried anything that was bead blasted.
OK, one more thing, once the smudges appear, I can take Windex and wipe it off, but only about 85% of the mark is removed, it still leaves a small darker spot.
It gets way better, but it never returns to how it was before I originally touched it. So as I play, it gets worse and worse, and each time I clean it ,it never looks as good as it did the time before…
I just think it would fill in all the pores of the finish, deepen the color, and probably help mitigate the appearance of prints tbh, because the finish would be saturated.
Just a dare because I think it would probably be irreversible lol. Maybe if you scrub it with power wash and hot water, but I would assume it would forever be pulled into the micron textured surface.
I have a fair bit of experience with anodizing titanium.
Difficulty with Ti ano is that it’s an incredibly thin coating and it’s not a dye. Anything that might interfere or change the way light reaches and reflects off the surface will change the way it looks, and the thinner the oxide the bigger the change. This coating looks like it’s a lower voltage blue, which is one of the thinner coatings out there. Blast or not, I would expect to see this kind of discoloration after touching something with a low voltage color. Just harder to clean because of the blast texture.
Intentionally saturating with something to make it a uniform color like you did is probably the best solution.
If you ever run across a coating that can keep fingerprints off the surface and doesn’t change the interference properties of the Ti oxide, please let me know. I’ve been looking for one for a while.
