Metal Laser Cutting

Copper photo etching is often used to offer high electrical and thermal conductivity to metal components.

Through our Photo Chemical Etching process, the smallest and most complex designs are made possible such as electrical spring contacts, contact membranes, busbars, antennae and micro antennae, spring fingered contacts, heating elements and battery terminal as well as many other bespoke components to your own designs. The Copper retains all of its properties, as well as remaining burr and stress-free following our etching processes. At Qualitetch, we can offer your bespoke designs in a wide range of copper and Beryllium copper non-ferrous metal specifications and hardnesses as required.

Due to the high conductivity of Copper, the metal is often used for electrical, automotive and transmission components. One of its primary uses is for wiring and harnesses, especially within the automotive industry where many electrical components are manufactured from copper using the photo etching process.

The metal is cleaned once your design has been finalised, and the metal sheet covered with UV sensitive photo-resist before printing your design. The metal is then taken through a chemical bath with ferric chloride, which acid etches the design from the metal sheet to produce your finished precision components.

Any trace of UV photo-resist remaining is stripped and removed once the etching process has been completed − and your chemically etched metal parts are taken to our QA technicians for final dimensional approval.

Precision metal etched flat blanks that require subsequent metal forming operations can be processed in house in our dedicated form room. We have a number of fly and toggle presses as well as two 30 ton mechanical power presses, one 10 ton mechanical power press and one 7.5 ton hydraulic power press. Using our in-house tool-making facility Qualitetch have become a world leader for component manufacturing, we are able to design and produce simple “knife and fork” tooling arrangements for small batches right through to multi-stage die sets for more complex forms and/or high volumes. For simple 90 ° bends, we also have a range of universal form tooling which can be employed to further reduce component costs and lead times. We will always use our vast experience as component manufacturers to offer you the most cost effective method of component forming for your metal components quickly and without compromising on quality. When your metal formed parts require subsequent finishing operations, we can also arrange for these to be carried out at one of our reliable, high quality subcontractors. We always monitor the activities of our subcontractors under our own in house quality systems to ensure that you always receive parts of the highest quality first time and every time. Whether your parts require heat treatment, plating, passivation, anodising or painting Qualitetch can offer it all saving your business valuable time, effort and money. Give us a call today!

Here at Qualitetch we offer a quality service for etching Aluminium. The process of chemical etching with Aluminium is a specialist process and we have many years of experience etching this metal.

This is due to the fact that aluminium can be difficult to etch correctly if you do not have the correct process controls in place, which can lead to poor edges and a rough finished profile. Qualitetch have developed a process with our chemistry engineers to ensure that only the best quality etchant is used in our process to give the best possible results to your metal components.

The reason this metal can be difficult to etch is that aluminium is exothermic, meaning that it creates heat and gases on the surface of the metal as it is being chemically etched, which causes the aluminium to blow outwards and smut with carbon; roughening the surface.