Yes, brass definitely works just as well with this method…
Btw, I’ve had great dealings with Rose Metal Products on Amazon when buying copper sheet metal. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, but they have been great to me in the past; really accommodating, and their customer service rocked…
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Yes, you can easily etch brass with Ferric Chloride since both Copper and Zinc (the components of brass) form soluble chloride salts.
It is all about the chemistry. For instance silver is very soft, but it forms insoluble chlorides so you have to use Nitric acid (or Ferric Nitrate/Nitric acid) instead.
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What about iron, steel, aluminum?
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It seems iron & steel can also be done using ferric, or other acids, too…
I found this: http://www.wikihow.com/Acid-Etch-Steel
I know that a strong Lye solution (sodium hydroxide, can be bought in many forms) dissolves aluminum like butter; you can watch it fizz…
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Ferric Chloride works on iron and steel (very similar chemistry, steel just has a little more carbon). It also works on some varieties of stainless. You may find that it takes longer to etch Iron based alloys, and there are other ways that work better (simple electrochemical etching is one to investigate).
Aluminum is tricky and works better with different mordants (etchant). As @nunzioc says Sodium Hydroxide works but is nasty stuff unless you are careful! It is easy to dispose of cleanly though.
In ALL cases working with etchants means, almost by definition, that you are using potentially dangerous chemicals.
Be Careful!
Learn how to handle them!
And maybe most importantly, learn how to dispose of them safely when you are done!
Your local municipality may have rules you need to follow, and you need to know what they are.
Do NOT just pour these things down the drain, bury them in the back yard, or hide them in the garage.
Just don’t.
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100% spot on, and I should have mentioned this stuff in my step by step.
It’s not silly to wear full protective goggles (or even a full face mask), thick gloves, and a lab coat / long thick sleeves and long pants, full rubber / leather shoes.
Also, have a BIG, OPEN bowl of baking soda on standby, so you can quickly neutralize any spills, especially ones that come into contact with your body.
You don’t want to have to go looking for the box of arm and hammer, and then have to shake shake shake it out of the silly little hole, while your skin is melting away; you want to be able to grab and dump in a split second
Seriously, this stuff will dissolve your skin. Especially stuff like clear sulfuric acid; you can find videos online of that stuff dissolving chicken skin literally in mere seconds.
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So in the neighbors backyard or the cottage . Got it 
But in all seriousness, good to know. I assume I’ll have to wait for community disposal days or something. If these chemicals are this readily available there most be a know and common disposal method. More research…
Also Costco for baking soda. Got it 
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Huh. That link didn’t work for me, but this did:
@Rita looks like Discourse is mangling URLs pasted into the previewer with ampersands, converting them to & and breaking sublevel linking on sites like Amazon. That some links at Amazon are working despite this is luck that their parser doesn’t care about the supplied form data.
p.s. I hate geo-located shopping… grrr…
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Hmmm, your link in turn didn’t work for me. Odd…
This should maybe work; it’s a link to one of their items, and from there you can click on the seller (Rose Metal Products)
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Did someone mention the peroxide/vinegar/salt etching? It’s dead slow, I expect, but some people use it for circuit boards.
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I’ve also done the NaCl/electrolytic method using a repurposed 7.5V wall wart, but it doesn’t give nearly as smooth an etch as the FeCl3/citric acid etching solution. Slower, as well.
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If anyone is thinking “How slow?” … it’s dead slow as in:
- an hour instead of minutes for large surface areas
- lots of manual labor agitating the solution and metal
By comparison, though, it’s far more eco friendly. You can neutralize the solution with baking soda and discard it in the trash, or leave the solution out to evaporate and become Cupric Acetate – then throw the condensate in a fire for green flames.
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Could this be done with some form of pump, like a cheap submersible fountain pump, or will it kill the pump faster than etching the metal?
It would likely eventually kill the pump. Probably faster due to the solution flowing through it.
You could, however, put it into a tray on top of a center pivot that allows it to rock the tray back and forth. If you had some way to put it in an plastic ultrasonic tray, that would probably be the best you could expect.
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Just pump air through the solution with a cheap aquarium pump.
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When I diid a lot of etching for intaglio printing I had a bath with a bubbler like @cynd11 suggests. The other trick is to put the plates in upside down with the bubbler under them. That way the bubbles do their work, and all of the crud that comes off the plates falls off and does not block the the surface being etched.
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Yes but not in the way you think. Get a large aquarium air pump and tape it to the exterior of the etching bath container. What you’ll be getting is a vibratory agitator. 
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You could also do a peristaltic pump – I know there are plenty of 3D printable designs, but I don’t know if there are laserable ones. Yet.
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There are many ways to make a simple tray agitator. Cut a cam on the laser. Attach it to a geared down motor. Mount the cam under one end of your tray and hinge the other. Or use a servo.
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