Electroplating - Easy DIY Nickel, Copper, Zinc Plating

960,500 views
•Sep 27, 2018




16K 650 Share
Save








Geoffrey Croker

60.6K subscribers






The recipe for basic electroplating. 1. Vinegar. 2. A dash of salt. 3. A piece of whatever metal you plan to use. I recommend starting with Nickel. I don’t know what other metals will work or not. Experiment like a mad scientist and find out. Just be careful around chemicals. I don’t think



there is anything particularly nasty about the nickel, copper, or zinc solutions. But I’m not a chemist so use your own judgment. I wear gloves and don’t go out of my way to breath the fumes. There will be a small amount of chlorine gas produced by the salt. Just don’t be a dork and



you’ll live through it. A couple of notes… Don’t try and plate over zinc plated parts with anything other than zinc. The zinc will destroy the nickel/copper solutions. I mean, don’t let me stop you experimenting, but that’s probably what will happen. Be careful around stainless steel. It



contains chromium. I don’t know what happens when you try this with stainless, but best not to mess with anything that might contain chromium. For that matter, real chrome plating at home is out of the question unless you have a death wish. Hexavalent Chromium, which is



what’s used for electroplating, is really nasty stuff. A cobalt/nickel mix is a close enough visual match for chrome plating. When you’re ready to step up to a kit, for New Zealand and Australia, I recommend Jane Kits. For the rest of the world, google Caswell Plating.

 

Len Burton

Back when I worked as a photolab technician we would drop copper pennies I to exhausted film fixr . after a few minutes it would start to grow little silver whiskers , they werent pure silver as the copper contaminated the silver. A simplified explaination of this is your film has light sensitive silver



salts that are needed for exposure and are removed during processing being dissolved in the fixer (typically sodium thiosulfate) a typical recycling strategy was to flow the solution through a steel wool filter then send it to kodak. At one of the labs I worked at they did not recover the silver from



the one hour film processors so I put a ball of oooo steel wool into the waste tank, the silver dissolved in the fixer would exchange for the iron in steel wool and after a while you would have silver wool. Doing this for 4 years I ended up with 8 pounds of silver after refining. Every girl I went out with for



years got a handmade silver ring also I made a crossguard for a longsword I made. Fun times