[Tzk]

Yes it’s doable at home, even with fairly primitive tools. You need several chemicals and (if you wish) colored dye.

Anodizing works as follows:

1. Take the MacBook apart

2. Clean it

3. Chemical bath to remove old anodized layer

4. Clean it again

5. Chemical bath with power supply attached. applied voltage+current and duration will determine hardness and thickness of the anodized layer.

6. Clean it

7. Dye it.

8. Seal the dye in a hot water bath.

It’s fairly straight forward to do.

[darkwater]

This made me smile because in my book this is at every effect impossible, especially if the goal is getting a functioning laptop at the end of the process. To be clear, it's impossible for me because I lack the knowledge, expertise and tooling to even think about doing it.

[madaxe_again]

Nonsense, it just makes it more effort for you - nothing is impossible.

Also, the way you acquire the knowledge, expertise and tooling is by screwing around with stuff where you have no idea what you’re doing.

[larusso]

Depending on the field you want to gain knowledge it can mean: “famous last words” or “missing body parts”. Nothing against the spirit of learning and challenge one’s skills. But especially people on YouTube show of quite dangerous things and sell them as everybody can do it. My list here: Metal / Wood work on a lathe with off center or unbalanced pieces in a 3 jaw chuck.

Playing around with lithium batteries to build bigger battery packs (DYI Perks did this and even though he mentions the dangers of doing that (fire or electric shock) it’s still inspires people to do the same in their living rooms.

Then is playing with chemicals.

Again I’m not saying don’t do it. But one should ease into things not just grab a random set of chemicals and disassemble a laptop and hook up a power supply etc by just following a list from the internet.

[darkwater]

Well, it's impossible to me given my natural born level of habilites with this kind of work, and the time I would need to invest to learn how to do it properly. Because it's not just a matter of buying some device and do it, you need to learn by trial and error, add more and more physical tools to your toolbox, have the dedicated space where to store and try all of it safely etc etc

[mjlee]

13 year old me who anodised remote control car chassis completely agrees the process is quite simple.

In the context of a MacBook, it’s not. Removing just the aluminium components and leaving everything that doesn’t like baths undamaged is practically impossible for amateurs. I’m not sure it’s something many professionals would take on.

[notpushkin]

I think it could be possible for the bottom half. The lid would be way, way trickier (unless you have one with a broken screen already and know how to put the new one together).

I’m wondering what custom colours you could do with that process btw!

[mjlee]

Practically anything! Vibrant colours work best, and there are techniques to do transitions, fades, and masking to get multiple colours, though I’ve never done those myself.

[grvbck]

Not strictly DIY because a professional anodizing workshop did the actual anodizing, but cool results nevertheless:

https://lowendmac.com/2024/ryan-andersons-colorized-anodized...

[justinclift]

> 1. Take the MacBook apart

Otherwise known as "remove everything from the chassis, leaving only the chassis."

But do so in a way that lets you fully re-assemble it later on, after you've finished the re-anodising.

> 7. Dye it.

Why the dye? I thought anodising's colour comes only from the voltage used, with no dye needed.

ie you can pick the colour you want, but you need to get the voltage correct for that colour

[numpad0]

> Why the dye? I thought anodising's colour comes only from the voltage used, with no dye needed.

That's true for anodization processes for some other metals like titanium and stainless steel, but aluminum is dyed. Also the process is material specific. Anodization for Al is only possible because Al does that unique self organizing micropore thing.

[justinclift]

Yep, you're right. I was thinking of titanium. :)

If anyone's interested in details of Aluminium anodising, this seems like a decently thorough introduction: https://nzic.org.nz/unsecure_files/book/8E.pdf

[throw_a_grenade]

No, that's steel, and not with voltage, but with temperature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_coloring_of_metals. For aluminium, you add dye to third bath.

[rbanffy]

Reversing step 1 will be the real tricky part.