Before you relic anything

I'm in the process of building a P bass. I had some cheap chrome knobs laying around that I decided I would mess with ye olde Muriatic Acid and see what would happen. I got the knobs, shook them around for a while, got them lightly dinged to where I liked, and prepared my containers for the vapor treatment. I was going for a very subtly aging look, and as they were junk parts there weren't very high stakes.

Or so I thought.

Before we continue, a little backstory: I'm a mechanical engineer, and believe it or not that requires an unnecessary amount of college chemistry classes. All of what follows I should've seen coming a mile away.

Back to the story.

I went to the dollar store because I didn't want to ruin any of my usable containers and picked up some cheap pie tins with lids for me to use. I head back to my workspace, put my parts in the inner tin, pour in the muriatic acid, and go to turn on the ventilation.

Oh boy.

When I come back, the container is absolutely billowing fumes and smoke. Muriatic acid reacts with metals like tin and aluminum. I knew this. Everyone knows this. Why I didn't think of this, I will never know.

Anyway, smoke is pouring out of the container as the acid burns through the bottom of the container, all over the table, and onto the polished concrete.

Muriatic acid is used as industrial concrete bleach. Meaning that it ate through the top layers of the concrete and permanently stained the floor.

The worst part is, I use a public workspace, meaning I don't own the floor that I ruined.

Live and learn everyone. Only use plastic, acid-safe containers when handling chemicals. Also, it'd probably pay off to just do it outside. That way if you're unsure and something goes wrong, you'll only kill your grass and poison your water supply.

Side note: google muriatic acid reacting with aluminum. Now imagine a 12"pie tin filled halfway full with the stuff.