Replating silverware at home

A. Dear Mr. Lewbel I just returned from my sister's house and watched her use a product that she ordered from a catalog. She was trying it out on several silver items which were really a mess. Some of them had failed to polish, were black and dull looking.

She found that the item she was using not only made the silver look wonderful, it appeared to replate the areas that were blackened, or where the silver was rubbed off with brass showing through. I have not called them yet, but I thought that you might be interested in doing so.

A. Thanks, Sandra! Although those products are not electroplating, and have two serious limitations, they do deposit a thin coating of silver on the item, and some people seem well satisfied with it. The limitations arise because they are an immersion deposit, i.e., the electrochemical voltage difference between the copper/brass and the silver powers the reaction. So, those solutions will not work with aluminum, steel, or stainless steel; second, as soon as there is a thin plating on the item, no more copper/brass is exposed, so the reaction stops. Real electroplating can build a much thicker plating. Although this may not offer the "lasting bright finish" that Dr. Lewbel seeks, it may be "good enough" considering the alternatives.

We've now added an FAQ, "Silver Plating at Home" which compares this approach with real electroplating, and sources those resilvering products..

Dr. Lewbel: non-cyanide silver plating solutions are available from vendors such as EPI / Electrochemical Products Inc. [a finishing.com supporting advertiser]. If you wish to try to formulate a silver plating bath, you will be limited to cyanide-based silver plating, as has been the standard for a hundred years. With your background you will recognize its extreme toxicity. Hopefully, less experienced readers won't try it. But you'll find a table with all the ingredients and operating conditions.
in the Electroplating Engineering Handbook [on AbeBooks or eBay or Amazon] as Table 21. It is best to do a silver strike before the silver plating, and you'll find the info for that one in Table 20. Good luck!

A. Back in the 1980's I demonstrated a product called Silver Solution and Silver Maintenance Solution at The Bon dept. store. I even brought my own silver to demonstrate on, as well as asking people for their pennies. The product was made by Sheffield, a well known name in the world of Silver. Some years later when my bottles were empty I couldn't find it at all. Finally in 2005 I found a contact. It was the old product and I was delighted. It is not cheap, but the more you buy the less the cost. It would be nice to find someone in the states who carries it, and see if the price would be less. If anyone finds a local server, please let me know.

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Thanks, Chellis. This letter is but one of a dozen on the same subject, and it was proving impossible to maintain working links for the ever-shifting URLs scattered across our pages. So we are now maintaining links for that product and a bunch of competitive products on our "Silver Plating at home" page. Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
April 18, 2008

A. Hi, Roger. Thanks for the kind words. As noted, we didn't put links to Silveron or a Canadian source of resilvering solutions on this page; rather, those links are on our Silver Plating at Home FAQ because it's possible to maintain the links in one place but impossible if we scatter them across over 50,000 threads.

As for the suggestion against electroplating yourself, it's not quite hysteria. 95% of Decorative Silver plating, as opposed to many other kinds of plating, is still done out of a cyanide-based bath. You will probably find cyanide impossible to get because it is an extremely powerful, instantaneous acting poison if even a very small amount is accidentally ingested. And if you accidentally acidify it, which is very easy, you've built yourself an old California gas chamber. There are a few commercially available non-cyanide silver plating baths, but they were intended for electronics, and even their proud sellers are quick to note that the color is somewhat off ... but a color which is not quite right for Tiffany to market might be okay for personal use since people will naturally be more forgiving of their own efforts than on something they bought.

You could also perhaps try copper plating your item and then use NuShine [on eBay or Amazon] wipe-on silver plating or similar.

Regards,

A. Hi, Ann.

Plating does not repair pits, and the immersion plating solutions being discussed here will only deposit a few millionths of an inch thickness. Pits are much bigger than that. I don't think it will offer much help, but you could try it.

Regards,

A. Hi Ken. Sorry, I'm not personally aware of any published generic formulation for brush silver plating solutions. The formula for cyanide-based tank plating solution is in every plating textbook, and I'm confident that you'll want to make it up more concentrated, and perhaps with a thixotropic agent like fumed silica or barium sulphate, but I don't know specific details, and don't think anyone is publishing it.

Regards,

A. Hi Pete. Mantoloking was badly hit by Sandy (as were the lagoon areas of Toms River where my house was destroyed). So I hope you still have a summer home.

We have a dozen or more threads about "The Silver Solution" and similar products, so instead of trying to maintain ever-changing sourcing info on a dozen pages, we moved all sourcing info to our FAQ on Resilvering at Home. Best of luck.

Regards,

Hi Ted,
Thanks for your quick reply. I have ordered a bottle of the Silver Solution from H S WALSH & SONS LIMITED. It may take a while to get here from over the pond but it is good to know that the product is still available.
Thanks
Pete

A. Hi Bill. The 'right' way to restore them is to send them to a plating shop or silversmith to be replated with silver. If you can't find anyone to do it at an acceptable price, and you are handy and artistic, the 'silver plating at home' solutions may be good enough. Anything other than silver plating is not going to look right.

Regards,