Plating At Home

We have a Caswell plating setup at my shop.

It works great. If you do anything at all from home, I would suggest getting a good voltage monitoring system and run an aquarium/ fish tank powerhead to circulate the acid, for more even coating on the nickel.

Nickel looks good, but it does not have the same tint as chrome. It is not as white.

Make sure flow is set in the direction that you want the brightest side to show.

IMO, It's good to have a setup to do your own acid copper. Flash copper is what you see on new parts, but acid copper is higher build, which gives you the material you need to fill and trim out parts that need pitting repaired.

Chrome shops pay workers to do a lot of sanding and pit filling that can be done better, with higher quality control at home, then sent off to some place that has the government paperwork with a thousand agencies to run chromium without contaminating an entire city's worth of water.

The less time it takes to have a plater do the work, the less it will cost you in the end.

We started doing it for quality control purposes, because I was sick of seeing details sanded out of things and pits ignored in the plating process, causing pinholes.

If you buy anything from Caswell, if nothing else, I would recommend the voltage controller.