Plating At Home

I have tooled around with plating (the back yard way) and I am no expert by any means but figured I would throw in on the subject.

First of all.....you can make the kit yourself.

if you have a battery charger, a chunk of plating material (anode) and the electrolyte solution....you can do it at your home in a bucket.

the problem with nickel plating is that the ingredients needed to make the nickle solution (bath) are kind of hard to find.

however, you can get what you need from somewhere like ebay, a small bottle/bag of nickle sulfate ( they basically look like green rock salt crystals ).

you then poor the crystals into water or whatever you find works best.

then you would hook up one charger terminal to your base material that will be emitting the metal particles,and the other side goes to what you are coating and you submerge each into your solution bath and turn on the juice ( for small projects like copper plating a quarter....you can even do the plating process with something as small as a 9v battery) ....and your plating!

of course there are some technical things you need to know but that is the basics.

as for zinc.....you can do everything the same basically as I mentioned about.....you can do it with copper also.

if you take and mix a cup of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide and mix them about half and half and put them in a microwave and heat it until its at a boil.

then sprinkle a pinch of salt (no we are not baking lol ...salt just speeds the process) then drop about 10 pennies into the cup.

you will right away see a reaction as the pennies start to fizz. after a few seconds your peroxide/vinegar solution will start to turn neon blue (no I am not joking) after about 5-10 minutes the reaction will stop.

the solution (now blue) will be a copper sulfate electroplating solution.....you can use that solution to copper plate things ( I have copper plated a few quarters and things...its pretty neat).

and whats left of the pennies is a greyish silver material...that material is zinc.

you can then do the same process to make a zinc solution....and you can zinc plate some things.

it won't have a great shiny luster to it but with some polish it wouldnt look bad.

also if you want, once you plate something with zinc you can take a blow torch to your part that you zinc plated and it will turn it gold.

anyhow, sorry for rambling...I just thought I would share some of what I have picked up on in messing around a little with plating.

but when it comes to getting a plating system....I have heard good things about the eastwood system and I seen a demonstration of it on the speed channel I think it was and the results were pretty nice!...pretty niffty set up to keep on hand for little things like door handles and ash trays and things like that.

as for plastic electroplating....the professional systems used I am not exactly sure of the process.

HOWEVER I do know a way to electroplate plastic that works great with do it yourself kits such as the eastwood kit.

you can buy either in a rattle can or cans of paint that are sprayable through a gun that have microscopic metal particles mixed in that allows electricity to flow through it..... I believe its refereed to as conductive paint.

hope that somewhere in my rambling you manage to find something useful LOL