Etching brass?

[Dave Harris sctchbld]

I wonder if I could, for instance, take the a drawing of a tender with the rivet detail, iron the image onto brass, and etch it to leave the rivet detail raised above the rest of the brass.

not to rain on your parade but have done a bit of PE and rivet detail would be very hard as in etching you have undercutting and the more material removed the more the undercutting occurs also if you look at a etched edge it is not square .it more resembles a slightly concave edge whitch would be ok if you wanted to have square headed rivets.
jim

Here are a few shots of a scratch built tender I built to test photo etching techniques I had read about.
I had Kinkos photo copy on clear acetate the sides of a Riverossi Y6B tender to get the rivet & panel line detail . When I asked them to copy it , The clerk rather curtly told me " This aint star trek, we don't have a replicator" ! Took some convincing to get him to do what I wanted , but I was trying to do it without having to do a lot of art work. Never had any complaints about how the rivets turned out --- BUT I don't let "Rivet Counters" in the house!

One word of caution, if you are going to try photo etching , be aware that you NEED a good respirator to avoid the Zylene fumes, they are NASTY! I was only exposed to them for abour 3 minutes ( with out protection because I did not know I needed it) & got a violent headache that lasted for hours. Research on Zylene showed that it causes severe brain damage with prolonged exposure. BE Careful!!