How to make brightener for cyanide zinc plating

A. Mr. Lombar, none of the high reputed chemical vendors got its formulas though an internet chat. To develop your own high quality brighteners will require that you do what the others did. Study chemistry, investigate, experiment and invest a lot of money and time. If you do it and succeed you'll know why they cost "so much".

A. Hello Nikhil. None other than our royal Indian Companies will sell you Cyanide Zinc brightener at approx. $1 per litre, which is the average price in India. At that price why bother making your own? A Proprietary Chemical supplier from abroad suffered a minor heart attack on learning this price, his remark quoted verbatim was 'At these prices we wouldn't even despatch water from our factory let alone cover the packing cost!'Take heart and forget about brightener bills; believe me it would be more worthwhile to concentrate your energy to make an exit from Cyanide Zinc Plating very soon.

A. I fully agree with the first response (I'm a little prejudiced with all the time and money I have spent on product development); this said I will tell you that you can research a variety of obsolete products used as brighteners in the past if they are good enough for you. But remember, if something doesn't work, now you are in the chemical service business.

A. NikhilI am curious why anyone would want to make a Cyanide Zinc Brightener today. Is it for cost savings? Do you know the cost of Cyanide zinc brightener to deposit 1 kilo of zinc is not more than Indian Rupees twelve... at say Rupees fifty five a liter or so in Pune. Do you know what percentage your cyanide zinc Brightener costs are over your total turnover? Look at these numbers first ...Incidentally my good friend Mr Khozem Vahaanwala has directed or nudged you away from Cyanide zinc. He uses Alkaline cyanide-free zinc in Bangalore. That's why he's smiling in that photograph. It's a Cyanide-free smile. You could investigate the ANC (Alkaline Non Cyanide ) zinc he is using. Actually his lunches are great for outstation visitors. We can rid your factory of cyanide and save you money & Pollution headaches from MSPCB. Think about all this. Regards,

Hi Daryl,
We constantly discourage home plating, and continually encourage purchase from reputable vendors. No formulas are being traded -- you see repeated responses that such requests will be refused. There are no pricing offers, just an effort to trivialize cost savings from home brew so people aren't tempted.

This site is made possible by clearly labeled advertising. So here we have an Indian plating shop, and an Indian supplier, both spending their money here in America helping make this English-language site available to share camaraderie & tech tips. Their tongue-in-cheek talk about "free lunch" is simple fun & banter between paying advertisers, certainly no scandal :-)

We appreciate your many fine postings on this site and hope you don't actually view the site negatively :-)

Regards,

Gentlemen,There are no free lunches anywhere. If Mr Nikhil Lombar was to see Alkaline zinc being run in a scientific manner at Mr. Vahaanwala's factory in Bangalore some 300 miles from his own city of Pune, Mr. Nikhil would be able to hone into a better profit-making direction than saving money in cyanide zinc plating by producing a cyanide zinc brightener which is so cheap in India it costs just 13 US cents to deposit a pound of zinc. Making cyanide zinc brightener is not worth the time. Whereas Alkaline zinc runs at 90 percent of the cost and is pollution free (Ever seen an EPA man smile? When you run non-cyanide zinc, they do). You can earn lunches when you consider this direction. That's what a lot of platers world-wide, including USA have done, Sir. They installed Alkaline cyanide-free zinc and laugh all the way to the bank.Regards,

A. Hi Gosai. As people have repeatedly said, it probably doesn't make sense to enter a declining market like brighteners for cyanide zinc plating.

But search expired patents if you wish; and the previously referenced books will tell you that benzyl chloride quaternary compounds of nicotinic acid, covered by U.S. patents 3,318,787 and 3,411,996 are the technology basis of practically every cyanide zinc brightener in use today. Good luck!

Regards,

A. Dear,
Brightner formula is simple:
it's sugar pure cane sugar -- try it in water solution just 50 g per half liter

A. Hi Josh

Why did you change if the old brightener is still available?

Do you have any reason to believe that the new brightener is the same chemical as the old and at the same concentration?

A common reason for oiling out is far too much brightener.

You need to skim off all the oil you can and possibly do a carbon treat to remove excess organics.

The main lesson is don't change any major part of a process without trying it first on a small scale.

Or, to put it another way, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The reason for changing the brightener was the price and the concentration of both were tested and they were the same!