WHAT IS PHOTOCHEMICAL MACHINING?

Photochemical machining, which is commonly called “chem. milling”, “photo etching”, or just plain “etching”, is a method of blanking parts out of a sheet or strip metal using chemicals rather than by the use of “hard tooling”. Such as stamping dies. Stepped, raised and recessed, areas can also be achieved using multiple passes of this process.

The “tooling” for this method is usually photographic film or glass. Grace commonly uses both, based on dimensional and tolerance considerations of given parts.

The following graph illustrates the steps involved.

Photochemical Machining Process