How-To: Nickle Plating

[alang]

Nickle:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R4 ... t=0&_oac=1

Thanks! I always forget that you can get everything on eBay

Andreas

[Adam_G]

Thanks guys! If I had thought about turning this into a how-to when I started the project I would have taken more photos or even a video or two. Let me know if you have any questions or if I'm missing some details.

As promised, here's how to plate larger objects.
I had to devise this method when I wanted to plate the steel top plate for my motor. Also the spring barrel cups, but there weren't as big a problem as the top plate. A lot of the same steps will apply here, such as:

1. Prepare your part. Get it clean, sanded, and polished. I used glass bead blasting instead of sandblasting so that I didn't warp my plate. However glass beads were not strong enough to get the remaining old plating off, so I then used my orbital sander, and then hand sanded with finer grits until I could polish it.

De-rusted and ready for blasting

Glass Bead Blasted. You can still see the areas where the plating remains. Slightly different color.

Orbital sanded here. Did some fine sanding and polishing after this.

This is just the bare steel after polishing. Looks great, but it will rust.

2. Make electrolyte using same method as before. Use a little more salt to compensate for the extra quantity and be prepared for this to take longer. I used my car battery charger this time on the 10amp setting to speed it up, but it still took about 15 hours. Finding a container that was clean, clear, and would resist the heat generated was the hardest part. I took a gamble with this plastic beverage container and it seems to hold up to the heat just fine. Notice the aluminum pan I have it sitting in just in case the container decided to burst or melt.

Making Electrolyte

Nickel crystal things again, so time to stop the brewin'

3. Since my container is plastic, I couldn't use the hot plate to keep the electrolyte warm. My solution was to use an automotive car battery warmer wrapped around the container to keep everything toasty. Problem was the warmer only kept the liquid slightly warm; nowhere near the 120F I had before. Back to the auto parts for solution #2, I grabbed a spare block heater plug I had kicking around. This is a part a lot of you won't have on your shelf, but I highly recommend acquiring one from your local auto parts store for something like this. It's basically a heating element that's meant for heating up liquids, so this worked great! I used the wire to perch the block heater on the edge of my container, being sure to keep the heating element submerged, but not the plug itself as that would trip some breakers. This thing works super fast and gets super hot, so don't leave it in there long! I used my infrared thermometer to check it constantly, and when it got to 120F I unplugged it and removed it from the container. Now the battery warmer blanket would prevent the temp from dropping to fast.

battery warmer blanket and block heater

Block heater close-up.

[Adam_G]

4. Start your plating as per previous method. You may have notice in my setup pic that I'm using the D-cell batteries here. After attempting to plate my spring barrels is when I learned that those batteries didn't have enough oompf for the task. This is what a weak power source plating looks like:

Spring barrel plating with D-cell battery power source

weak plating

5. Lesson learned. D-cells are OK for small things, but since steel is a weaker conductor than small pieces of brass or bronze, a larger power source is needed. Hence my suggestion of using a Lantern Battery.

D-cell plating on left. Lantern Battery plating on right.

I didn't have enough room in my container to spin the barrel around while it was plating, so as you can see the extra power really helps to fling those nickel ions around better. In this pic you can see the plating reached around the edges and through the hole despite this being the side that faced away from the nickel source.

unexpected happiness

I don't think I had to even polish these after. They just came out looking great. Probably helps that these spring barrels don't have a mirror finish anyways.

I'll resume the story of the top plate tomorrow!

[VintageTechnologies]

This is a great tutorial on plating. Learning how to make the electrolyte is fantastic. I am inspired to try it when the need arises. eBay seems the place to search for "pure nickel plate" to buy nickel bars.

[Adam_G]

The tale of the motor top plate is now continued. This object would fit in that tall container, but the small piece of nickel I was working with would give me splotchy results because of that line-of-sight issue that occurs. I devised this method as a work-around:

1. Find a container big enough for your oversized object. In my case a 5 gallon pail was a good size, but far too deep, so I cut the bucket down to the bottom 3 inches.

2. Build some charge rails. Charge rails are anything conductive that you can hook up one of your battery leads to thereby allowing you to plate multiple objects at one since they are all pulling current from one source; a rail that conducts the charge. In my case it would act as a charge rail and supports for holding my plate off the bottom of the bucket. I used household copper wire, bent to shape, and only stripped where I needed it.

Bucket and household wire.

3. Next I drilled a couple holes in my nickel piece and made a simple handle with the household copper wire.

Stripped only the parts where I need contact. At the ends and in the middle.

4. I didn't want the exposed copper that's tied to the holes in the nickel exposed, so I used some plasticine (aka clay) to cover it up. The charge rail will be hooked up to the negative side of the battery, and the steel plate sits on the rails. The positive side of the battery is hooked up to this piece of nickel with the handle. Positive ions from the nickel will flow to the negative steel plate, which means I need to submerge the nickel to accomplish this. I don't want any of the copper that's holding my nickel to also plate to the steel, hence covering it with plasticine.

The setup

5. As per the other tutorials, be sure your part is cleaned and polished. Pour in enough electrolyte to cover the part and your nickel source. You'll need to use that block heater again to warm up the electrolyte to 120F.

Pour in electrolyte

6. The concept here is the same as using the upright container or glass jar, where the nickel and part are submerged and the nickel plates to the part that you rotate from time to time. In this case the part is stationary and you'll be moving the nickel around to counteract this line-of-sight issue, and achieve even coverage of the oversized part. I hope now you can see why the clay covering the copper wire was important. This was also the major fault of this set-up because the warm electrolyte would cause the clay to get soft and want to smear off the wire. Lesson learned; next time use hot glue.
Take your time and make slow methodical passes. You'll be able to see what part of the object is being affected by observing the bubbles the build up on it.
VERY IMPORTANT: do not touch your nickel piece to your part as this would ground out the circuit! You need to hover over your part while doing the passes! A trick to insuring this doesn't happen by accident is to put a large blob of hot glue over your copper wire where it's tied to the nickel piece. This large blob will act as an insulated bump-stop.

plating by moving the nickel by hand

7. The part will come out looking cloudy if you gave it a thick plating.

cloudy appearance

8. This can be buffed out however and gives a great shine. The steel plate was heavily corroded when I began, so there is still visible pitting on the plate, but I think this gives it a look of authenticity.

Polished to a shine

Next time I'll show my trick for platting parts that are heavily pitted (even more pitted than this steel plate).

[Curt A]

Thanks for sharing this, Adam... I always wanted to know a method for plating at home.

[VintageTechnologies]

I have only one question now: does the electrolyte wear out from use?

[Adam_G]

I have only one question now: does the electrolyte wear out from use?

In the short time I've been experimenting with it, it doesn't seem to wear out. The nickel particles are already dissolved in the vinegar, so it's not really going anywhere, nor can the metal go bad. If anything the stuff gets more concentrated over time, especially during use, because when you have to heat it up for use some of the vinegar will evaporate. I've had to top-up my electrolyte with more vinegar after leaving it sitting on the workbench for a week in the summer. No negative effects observed.


Now on to the final chapter of this plating how-to: Plating pitted metal.

1. My example is this little steel lever which is the on/off switch for my motor. It was completely covered in rust.

On/off switch original condition.

2. Do whatever you need to clean off that rust. I glass bead-blasted this little lever and the result showed that it was now a horrible pitted piece of steel:

glass blasted and pitted

3. If I was to nickel plate this now, all that pitting would look as it is now, just shinier. I devised a method based on this stuff called MuggyWeld, which is meant for repairing pits in pot metal trim parts on old cars. They had a special brazing rod that you could heat up and melt into the pits, then sand it smooth and send the part for chrome plating. I figured I could do the same thing, but use electronics solder instead. The important factor here is to use silver solder, which has no flux core and has a content of 90% silver. This has a high conductivity characteristic which will be important for plating.

Making sure to clean the part first (I use non-chloronated brake cleaner or rubbing alcohol), then spread some electronics flux on the pitted areas. I gently clamped this lever in the vise, then began to heat it up with a butane torch. When the metal is at the proper temperature the flux will bubble and begin to brown, that's when you smear on the silver solder:

Silver solder applied

4. Obviously this blob is too much, but the soldering is difficult to apply and does take a few tries, especially when doing both sides of the part. Anyways, just file it down a bit then use sandpaper to get it smooth with the surface of your part:

sanded smooth

5. Clean up your part again and polish it smooth:

Polished and ready to go

6. Then electroplate just like last time:

nickel plating in progress

7. Give it a slight polish to bring out the shine. Still some pits, but a lot better than before:

Plating done

8. Reassemble your part if needed.

Reassembled

This concludes all the tips and tricks I've learned for nickel plating. Hopefully this is useful for you do-it-yourselfers, just remember to label whatever bottle you store your electrolyte in so that you don't mistake it for Gatorade.

[Curt A]

Thanks again, Adam for all of the time it took to experiment and document this process... This will really be helpful.

[Mr Grumpy]

nice work!

I've done some home plating as well and have enjoyed it immensely!

Thanks Adam.