What exactly is Photo Etching???

Basically a photo negative is applied to brass sheet and dropped into an acid solution. The acid eats away the brass that is not covered by the dark areas of the negative. The industry has gotten very good over the years and will blow you away with the amount of detail that can be attained. Some really cool PE is the etched and colored ones I've seen for aircraft instrument panels

the photoresist is layed on top of the brass sheet and then it's stripped according to the negatives, aka masks (which can be both positive or negative...gahhh). The the part can be dipped into whatever is a better "etch" solution to eat away the brass that's not covered by the resist. then the resist is stripped off again and voila there is the basic explaination for the process of photo etching.

Man I had fun learning about that and doing lab work etching a ton of waffers in my micro electronics processing class.

try and look at some Hasegawa kits. PE parts for the F-14 come with it. pretty cool. but they are expensive..

It's basically the same process used to etch printed circuit boards. One of the things that makes it so detailed is that you can make the photo negative at a fairly large size, and then photographically reduce it to the scale you want.

Actually the process really etches a hole in your wallet!

LOL,good one trowlfazz! hehe

Photoetch, depending on the scale you're using, can be a very special kind of hell ... but one that we go to willingly, for some odd reason. Even odder, we go there repeatedly!

With computers being what they are, you can design a layout that's very large in a vector format. This way, no matter how small it gets, the proportions never distort. They can even be printed/exposed directly from the computer. Often the patern is printed by a really high quality printer and then exposed onto the film, which is then attached to the brass. The end result is that you have very tiny and detailed parts that you can attach to your kits.

A seriously insane modeler could theoretically set this up in their own workshop. Not for the faint hearted, but it might make a good retirement hobby business. The exposure unit will likely be the most costly piece of equipment needed.