Plating At Home

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jhdeval

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Has anyone tried any of these kits from caswellplating.com. I am considering trying the nickel electroless plating kit for some of my smaller parts. Like the ash trays and maybe the shifter center console. My concern is I am a firm believer in the "you get what you pay for" group. How good could it be for 50 dollars? I am not looking for a showroom car or even a competition car. I want something I am not afraid to drive any day of any week.

I personally think the showroom competition vehicle destroy the original intent of the manufacturer. Very few cars in my opinion were built as works of art and to that note they were designed to be driven. I am getting off track though and I hope I didn't upset anyone it was not my intention.

Anyway what I want to know is if anyone has tried any of these kits and were they worth trying? I don't expect to be able to do my bumpers, although at 300 a pop I would love to, but I have some smaller pieces that need some tlc and I want them to look pretty lol.
 
I was curious when I saw your post. From what I saw they were plating metal. I would like do some plastic things in my dash but don't believe that would work. Let me know what you find out. I think I will have a friend powdercoat my bumpers. He claims they will look like chrome just cheaper.
 
One of the guys at work has the zink plating kit from Eastwood. He used it to restore some motorcylce parts and was very happy with the way the parts turned out.
I'm planning on using it myself soon on some shifter parts.

Ted
 
i just read an article in a mag. they were zinc plating. i think it was mopar action or mopar muscle. not sure which. i can t find the article now. it was an old mag. they said the zinc job worked, but wasn t that pretty when they were done. chaulky or something. but they said you could polish the piece afterwards and it looked awesome. i ve always wanted to try this too.
 
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
 
Good thread jh, this is something that I have been thinking about tackling as well. Im pretty sure I remember reading a thread on caswell.
Subscribed!
 
check out youtube ya all. i found some neat stuff on there as well this morning.
 
I've played around with the Copy Chrome kit from Caswell. The results were fair. To do that you also have to have their Flash Copper Kit. It's all fairly tricky and you have to have a decent power supply. You'll spend some money before you're done. One of the biggest tricks is prepping your piece to be plated. It's like doing body work. The plating itself is so thin that if there's even the tiniest imperfection, you'll see it in the finished piece. The process requires time and strick attention to details.

If you cruise the forum on their site you'll find guys who try it and really struggle to get results they're happy with. You just have to understand what you're getting into.
 
anyone know how to strip chrome off of parts, chemically? i figured some one has figured this out..
 
sounds....... not good. thanks for the info before i contaminated my whole neighborhood. lol.
 
Just an FYI. If you strip chrome from aluminum parts it will go down to the raw metal. But if you're attempting to strip parts that are steel and it has been triple plated the first plating process is nickle and that will not come off of the steel. Only the chrome and the copper will be removed.

Ted
 
Anybody have any updates? I did caswell's cold blackening after blasting bolts super clean and soak in laquer thinner. The results looked great but were hardly corrosion resistant when left in the rain for a couple weeks.
 

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might be kind of a back yard hoakey doakey way of doing something, but...

for my random nuts and bolts, i wire wheel them, get em red hot with a torch, and drop em in a cup of motor oil...

take em out, they look like new and have a nice black phosphate like finish on them...
 
I'm gonna hafta start payin' more attention to this!!!!
 
I remember we had metal shop at school. We made a center punch and then hardened the tip. last of all we heated it up and dropped it into USED engine oil. It did make it corrosion resistant when compared to just bare metal, but not as resistant as plating would, if my memory serves me correctly.
I too am thinking of doing some home plating so I'm very interested in this thread.
 
All those fancy motor oil additives probably stick to the nuts. How is the corrosion resistance?

corrosion resistance actually seems to be decent...definitely better than a bare wire wheeled nut or bolt...also like mentioned, it comes out nicer if ya use USED engine oil...the black stuff! lol
 
I've copper plated things using vinegar and 1.5 volts. Hook the pos to a chunk of copper and the neg to what you want plated. A few minutes for copper color, longer for corrosion resistance, even longer for a layer that you can use to polish out defects. If you go to high voltage the copper does not stick.
 
I am considering zinc followed by black, blue or yellow chromate now. Longevity of corrosion resistance and a nice factory looking finish are my concerns.
 
I am so itching to plate some parts. It looks like this thread is a bit stale but..

I see zero point in paying for basic plated chassis stuff.
Particularity if you can follow the plate with a short spell in a tumbler full of walnut shells.

I got this from a thread, poster's name was Snakeoil and I copied it cause it may go away at some point as the post was from 2010 http://www.triumphrat.net/classic-vintage-and-veteran/160243-zinc-plating-at-home.html , so it will be here:



Zinc Plating at Home Over the weekend I tried a zinc plating process for small parts at home that was entirely a do-it-yourself exercise. By that I mean that I did not buy any plating kit or anything elaborate for the process. I read about the process on the Honda 305 forum and based on photos publised by the author and having a bunch of crummy looking parts on my Scrambler, I thought I'd give it a try.

I'm sharing this here because I think everyone on this forum who is interested in sprucing up their old bike should know how to do this. This topic may have been covered on this forum before so I don't want to rehash old news. I'll just give you a quick rundown of what is needed and provide a picture of parts I plated over the weekend. I will be using the process when I get into the resto of my '66 Bonnie.

Materials
Zinc - I used pure zinc roof strips sold to prevent fungus on roofing
Vinegar
Epsom Salts - 100gm/liter
Sugar - 120 gm/liter
Small 12vdc power supply (3 volts minimum)
plastic pail
digitial multimeter or DMM (for measuring milliamps)
small variable resistor (potentiometer or pot) - 500 ohms Radio Shack
Brass wire brush
Digital timer - not absolutely required, but makes things easier.

Building the System
You make cathodes from the zinc plate and line the walls of the pail with them. Connect them all together using copper wire and the end of that wire becomes the positive terminal for the set up.

String another copper wire across the top of the pail that is electrically isolated from the cathodes. That wire is the negative terminal and the wire from which you will hand the parts to be plated. We'll call this the top wire.

Mix vinegar, Epsom salts and sugar until all is dissolved and fill the pail with the solution. Hang the parts to be plated from the Top wire with either copper or stainless steel wire so the part is fully submerged in the plating bath. DO NOT LET THE PARTS OR THE HANGER WIRE COME IN CONTACT WITH THE CATHODE!! THIS WILL SHORT OUT YOUR CHARGER. The current flows thru the bath, which is an electrolyte and conducts current via the Epsom Salts you added.

Connect the negative lead of the charger to the negative terminal of the set up (Top wire) . Connect the positive lead of the charger to one terminal of the potentiometer. Connect the positive lead of the DMM to the other terminal on the pot. Connect the negative lead of the DMM to the positive terminal of the set up (cathode wire). Set the DMM to milliamps or amps as your meter requires.

Look at the rating on your charger. It should give the output voltage and the output current. It may give the voltage and watts instead. If it gives watts, just divide the watts by the output voltage to get the output current in milliamps. That output current is your max current. If you exceed that, you will damage your charger.

Part Prep
You need to remove all the old plating and any rust prior to plating. You can bead blast, acid clean, wire brush, sand, whatever you prefer. Remember that the plated finish is only as good as the finish on the base metal being plated. I use Phosphoric Acid to remove any old Cad plating and any rust. Stubborn rust like deep pits gets bead blasted. Then with rubber gloves on to prevent greasy finger prints, degrease the part thoroughly in something like acetone, dry it and then suspend it in the bath.

Plating
With everything connected and the part in the bath plug in your charger. Adjust the pot so that the current in ma is at or below the max output current for your charger.

Leave the part in the bath for 10 to 30 minutes. Unplug the charger and remove the part. The part should be plated with a dull light gray coating. Brush the plated surface (this is called carding) with the brass brush until the bright zinc plating appears. You can put the part back in the bath for a second coat, which I normally do.

Keep in mind that the plating will add anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.003 inch of plating, depending on how long you plate it. So fitted parts may need to be masked with paint or tape or sanded down when finished. The axel in the attached photo would not fit thru the wheel bearing when it was done so I polished the plating from the shaft section. The OEM plating was only on the ends of the axel as well.

Attached is a photo of some 305 Scrambler parts I plated over the weekend. This was the first time I've ever done this, having read about the process on the 305 forum on Friday. Here's a link to that thread so you can read the other details I observed as I did this. http://www.honda305.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6584

I've also attached a photo of my set up. My pail is a 1/2 gallon pail that had hot tube chemicals in it before. Try your local diner for similar plastic containers. They get tons of them and normally toss them out. Don't use a huge 5 gal pail because proximity of the part to the cathodes determines the time required to get a good plated surface. Also note that the plating is line of sight. By that I mean the zinc ions travel from the cathode to the anode (part) in a straight line. So if you have only one cathode, the surface facing it will plate better than the surface not facing it. This is why I say to surround the outer wall of your pail with zinc cathodes all hooked in series. This also means that for parts like the axel spacers and that big axel nut in the photo, I had to make a small cathode to fit inside the ID of those parts and not touch. I made a smaller set up with a small plastic butter tub to plate the ID on those parts first, and then did the outer surfaces in the set up shown in the photo here.

You won't be disappointed with the results. Happy Plating!

regards,
Rob
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Following as well. I tried a little zinc plating but wound up with dull grey finishes because I didn't have satisfactory current control. May have to dig out the stuff and try it again with a better power supply and some current regulation.........
 
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