It’s difficult to see in most of the photos of the tree house but the inside of the Triparator windows (on the house wall … yes I’ll get a photo soon) is lined with copper.
It always struck me as odd (though no one else ever noticed) that everything on the Treehouse looked old but that copper looked brand new.
Well, one of the things I plan on doing before we get to Coachella is to apply a patina to make the copper look aged.
I really want them to have that blue-green that aged copper gets (like the Statue of Liberty).
Intrestringly in research on copper patins I read that you can get a really nice blue-green on copper with Cupric Nitrate. (yes, it’s nasty stuff)
I was about to order some one line when I realized that Cupric Nitrate is one of my etching byproducts.
Brass is an alloy that has allot of copper in it. This copper reacts with the Nitric Acid to make Nitrogen Dioxide (even nastier stuff) and Cupric Nitrate. That is why the Nitric Acid turns blue.
So I tried apply some of my homebrew Cupric Nitrate to some copper with b bit of heat and got some great results (shown below). These are just tests and I used too much heat and too much Cupric Nitrate on them but the colors are rad.
The top three are pure Cupric. The bottom left is Cupric Nitrate mixed with a bit of Cobalt Nitrate which seemed to bring out more blue/purple colors. The bottom right is a mixture of Cupric Nitrate and Ferric Nitrate.
What’s really cool about this one is that the Ferric brings a range of yellows and browns to the greens and give the copper a nice rust color. Why is that so cool? Because it’s the exact look we are getting on the roof panels and we wanted them to look like they were made of copper.
Is that a typo in the page title?
Is ‘Patina’ missing the ‘t’?
Richard — It is. Thank you. I’ve fixed it.