  Electrochemical methods have recently become an interesting tool for
fabricating and characterizing nanostructures at room temperature. Simplicity,
low cost and reversibility are some of the advantages of this technique that
allows to work at the nanoscale without requiring sophisticated
instrumentation. In our experimental setup, we measure the conductance across a
nanocontact fabricated either by dissolving a macroscopic gold wire or by
depositing gold in between two separated gold electrodes. We have achieved a
high level of control on the electrochemical fabrication of atomic-sized
contacts in gold. The use of electrochemistry as a reproducible technique to
prepare nanocontacts will open several possibilities that are not feasible with
other methodologies. It involves, also, the possibility of reproducing
experiments that today are made by more expensive, complicated or irreversible
methods. As example, we show here a comparison of the results when looking for
shell effects in gold nanocontacts with those obtained by other techniques.
