Where the
world gathers for metal finishing
Q&As since 1989


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Bronzing of shoes

I have been given a project and am overwhelmed to see what your site had to offer. My project questions are related to the questions you answer in this page. I need to find out how this process of bronzing shoe works. I need to understand how a non conductive material is turned into a conductive one, and what electrodes are used for this process. Please kindly help me out. I will be eternally grateful.

Yours sincerely,

Waqar
- North York, Toronto, Ontario
2002

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I'm not quite understanding the question, Waqar. You have a school project about bronzing shoes or about metallizing non-conductors? Or you have an industrial project to metallize something? If you will please post the details of your own actual situation instead of alluding abstractly to it, we could be of much more help. But there are at least 6 different ways of metallizing non-conductors (painting with conductive paint, colloidal conductive coatings, two-part silvering, palladium seeding & electroless plating, vacuum metallizing, firing of gold), depending on what it is that you are metallizing, and where you are trying to go with it, and nobody can write a whole book on line for you covering all of the different approaches. Shoes are probably usually just painted with copper, graphite, or silver based paint before electroplating; but many 'bronzing' companies don't even really plate shoes anymore they just coat them with shiny paint.

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
2002