How to Set up a Simple Home Electroplating System

A. See our FAQs "How Electroplating Works" and plate some scraps yourself -- it will cost nothing. Then see "Introduction to Chrome Plating"; it may help you, Raymond, please give it a look! Nickel plating as a hobby is one thing, but it would be difficult for you to make a business out of plating in your garage due to OSHA safety regulations and EPA waste disposal regulations; plus the toxicity of chrome plating solutions makes chrome plating impractical.

The plating industry was the country's first EPA-regulated industry, and the burden of compliance is heavy. Further, chrome plating solution is carcinogenic (think Erin Brokovich [adv: DVD on eBay & Amazon affil links] and hexavalent chrome). So if you charge a friend a few dollars to plate something, you are starting on the slippery slope of being subject to reporting and disposal requirements. So please start by investigating the regs before buying anything and becoming forever responsible for it.

Why do we say "forever responsible"? Picture what happened in the old days when a company generated toxic waste: they would hire a contractor for disposal. But if that contractor turned out to be an evil midnight dumper who pockets the disposal fees and dissolves the corporation and disappears -- it left the public to pay the cleanup costs. To address that problem the EPA came up with a simple rule: it doesn't matter who you ship hazardous waste to, or how much you paid to get rid of it, or how long ago it was: the "generator" of the waste remains responsible for it forever! Then add their 'joint & several liability' clause and you realize that when you can't separate your waste from others' wastes it's a very bad thing :-(

So practice plating some small parts safely with kitchen chemicals, then move on to buying a quart or so of nickel plating solution and practicing with it and learning. Best of luck, but be careful to not buy chrome chemicals until you've learned a good bit!

A. Hi PRK,

Yes, you saw plating kits for about $29 some years ago from J.C. Whitney -- today Eastwood offers them at around $75-$80, but these were/are zinc plating kits not chrome plating kits. Zinc is one metal, and chrome is another -- it's an intensely regulated carcinogen! If you wish to investigate entry level electroplating, you can contact a supplier of brush plating equipment and small systems like Gold Touch [a finishing.com supporting advertiser]. Or just googling "hobby plating supplier" will find them.

But if you spend some more time reviewing inquiries from earlier posters with similar interests to yours, you'll see why we urge caution and investigating the regulations before you buy the chemicals (in particular, chromic acid / chrome plating solution!) and become responsible for them. In America, once you use the plating chemicals (probably once you open the bag), you're the "waste generator" and they become your waste forever! No matter how much you pay anyone to take, treat, or dispose of them, they are still your responsibility even 50 years from now & more. So look before you leap :-)

Good luck!

A. James -- brush plating and minimal tank plating is clearly possible. But you seem to be speaking of an automobile bumper or some other very big copper-nickel-chrome plated item, and this would be a huge undertaking both in how much you'd need to learn to apply all the layers, and the effort of successfully plating such a large item. I think you may want to start much smaller and with a chrome-free plating solution. But read our Intro to Chrome Plating.

Good luck!

A. Hi Donald.

Our site's focus is primarily industrial, where people typically spend thousands of times that much for a plating installation. We're certainly not trying to talk you out of a small investment in learning and experimentation. But quality plating with a real plating outfit is hard. Quality plating with a toy can be a joke. To chrome plate a bumper with a plating cell like the kits referred to would require thousands upon thousands of AA batteries. Your job is smaller, but look up Faraday's Law of Electrolysis and figure out how many hundreds of batteries you would need. And then you still have the issue of preparing the substrate so that your plating won't peel off, the fact that it's a chrome substitute not really chrome and it won't quite match, etc. It's a big job.

Our concern isn't whether you spend $75 -- please do! And please try the plating experiments in our FAQ "How Plating Works", which will cost you nothing at all. Good luck; we just want you to start small and with relatively safe materials, not tempt you out onto a slippery slope that can pollute, be very costly, or possibly beset you with fines before you are ready. Good luck!

I know it's twenty years later but this pops up when your researching plating...Here is the title,
How to Set up a Simple Home Electroplating System
Then this is a reply that was by Ted Mooney.
"Our site's focus is primarily industrial, where people typically spend thousands of times that much for a plating installation".
Kind of defeats the purpose of asking questions, doesn't it?

Patrick Murray
- PORT CHARLOTTE, Florida
December 27, 2023

A. Hi Patrick. Thanks for visiting & reading. But, even after 20 years I see nothing wrong here. The original poster is allowed to entitle his posting "How to Set up a Simple Home Electroplating System" if he wishes, I'm allowed to find industrial plating more interesting than hobby plating, and you're allowed to help him with his questions and hold whatever opinions you wish -- including about this page, its title, or my comments :-) Our pages have offered help to thousands of students & hobbyists with their electroplating questions & efforts, but it's just a simple statement of fact that a $75 plating kit is utterly & completely useless towards chrome plating a bumper. It's probably natural for newbies to think "plating is plating", but zinc plating a hex nut, or gold plating a chrome plated car emblem, or copper plating a leaf is one thing -- whereas chrome plating a bumper is something utterly different. One can be done with a 25¢ battery, and little safety risk or environmental issues; but the other needs a $25K power supply, is very dangerous to your health, and will wreak havoc with the environment. I believe it is appropriate for us to suggest to hopeful hobbyists what probably is within the range of their home electroplating efforts and what they would be wasting their time and money on while possibly exposing themselves to health risks and environmental messes. Further, you start small and practice on scrap, and learn the easier metals first -- you don't just up -&-chrome a bumper. Luck & Regards, Ted Mooney, P.E. RET Striving to live Aloha finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. I use a home kit frequently to chrome aluminum pieces. Just have to treat it first - remove the oxide layer and apply a layer of zinc -- I use a zincate solution.

MW Jansen
- Southern California
2004

Ed. note: Glad you found it easy.

Q. To MW Jansen: how about some details. I want to touch up a couple spots of chrome sheet metal.

Volts, amps, source of solution, what are anode and cathode materials, temperature, etc?

GF Kron
- Novato, California
2006

Jim: we're happy to print your opinion & everybody's -- that's what public forums are for. Here's all the space you want, free, to tell people anything you want about what you've learned. But I didn't 'blast' anyone.

I don't own, manage, or work for a plating shop, never did & never will, so you just paint yourself as a petulant adolescent when you blast me with claims of ulterior motive.

This free site includes thousands of pages of information for students & hobbyists, plating book reviews, links to plating educational societies and training sessions, ASTM plating standards, free MIL standards, addresses of free plating libraries, plus tens of thousands of highly detailed responses to plating questions & problems. We never censor postings (except ads & ad-hominem remarks); please share your experience instead of whining.

A. Hi Tyrone: This isn't the Hotel California; you can leave any time you like. Or you're welcome to tell people how to do electroplating at home. Here is all the space you want, an obviously eager audience, and it won't cost you a dime. So get to it -- unless your posting is just vacuous bitching.

Your analogy that our warnings are similar to telling people not to drive because they might get in an accident is perfect. The government requires that every driver be trained, tested, and licensed, and that every vehicle be registered, inspected, and insured. If you don't comply, you'll be fined, and in egregious cases you could get jailed.

Similarly, the government demands training, testing, and licensing of all plating shops and their employees. Operate a plating shop without the registrations, the blood tests showing that the employees are safe, the discharge permits, the testing of bath surface tensions, the ampere-hour logs, the waste accumulation records, the manifesting, the annual hazwoper certification, or without advising your neighbors of the dangerous materials that you have on hand (Community Right-To-Know law), and you are subject to fines or even jail time. I know two plating shop managers who did hard time.

Yes, you can probably operate a small plating business and stay below the radar, just as you can probably get away with driving without a license, registration, or insurance. And most regulations don't apply if it's just a hobby rather than a plating service.

But in my town we had a 'cancer cluster', so everything in the neighborhood was deeply investigated; all neighbors interviewed at length; names published in books and court records. If a child in your neighborhood contracts cancer and her parents find out that you were doing chrome plating in your garage, discharging carcinogenic fumes into the air, God help you! It's not likely to happen of course, but if it does, your life as you knew it is over.

Chrome plating in your garage! Cover ups and conspiracies!
I was born into a custom chrome plating business. I worked there as a young teenager. I'm in my mid fifties now. Custom chrome plating is all I have ever done. I run the business. I know every aspect. I have done everything. Metal stripping, polishing, bead blasting, cleaning and activating for plating, cyanide copper plating, acid copper plating, nickel plating, chrome plating, customer relations, reporting to various agencies (EPA, DNR, local sewer districts, Etc.) All accounting and payroll. I know I am missing a few things, but I think Ted will understand.

And now Tyrone says it's a big cover up to deny people a chance to make millions in their garage. Oh Lord! Maybe we need a Canadian disposal place that doesn't require permits and testing as inferred in an earlier comment. To think all the years wasted when I could have done it in my garage and made millions!

A. Hi, Michael. "Potmetal" may be zinc diecastings or aluminum diecastings (they look just about identical although aluminum is much lighter). But a 1968 car probably used zinc diecastings rather than aluminum, so zincating probably isn't necessary.

It isn't easy to fix those pits because the porosity absorbs water and plating solutions, thus causing contamination; plus the absorbed water or gases can come back as steam when the parts are heated and that causes holes and blisters. The usual way to deal with mildly pitted diecastings for restoration is to copper plate them in cyanide copper plating solution and "mush buff"; this means basically to "mush" the soft copper plating into those pits by/while buffing. After the pits are pretty much filled with copper you can go on to more copper plating, then nickel plating, then chrome plating. Severely pitted castings require a plating artist to hand-drill & hand-fill every one, and will cost hundreds of dollars each. But moderately pitted in your eyes might be mildly or severely pitted in someone else's:-)

Good luck!

A. For the purposes of a school science project, yes you can, Joe! Please see our FAQ: "How Electroplating Works".

For practical electroplating probably not, though. Look into Faraday's Law because plating is energy intensive and that AAA battery is only going to be able to electroplate a very thin layer of metal on an item the size of a dime before it's exhausted.

To understand why, recognize that a battery and a plating cell are actually the same thing running in opposite directions -- in electroplating we use a bigger battery or power supply to overpower the battery formed by the plating cell and force it to run in reverse. Your tiny AAA battery isn't going to win this battle of batteries except when plating a very small part.

A. Hi, Gus. The biggest cost of most things including plating, especially replating old stuff, is labor. It would be fair for a plating shop to charge you about the same amount for their time as a plumber or mechanic would -- maybe just a little more because of the cost of material and because a plating shop's equipment costs more than a plumber's equipment.

So the real issue is how long will it take, and this will depend on the condition (how much buffing and polishing is required) and on how high quality the job is. Reworking a single old bumper involves far more labor hours than manufacturing from scratch a new mass-produced one. So, unfortunately, it usually costs at least the same as a new bumper, often more; and replating an old diecast hood ornament, with all the attendant drilling and filling of pits, can easily cost 10x-20x the cost of a new one.

A. Ted is on the money with everything he has said. I began looking around for a home based chrome plating kit...thinking it was that easy. It costs about $500 here to strip, repair and rechrome a vehicle bumper. In my wisdom, I thought I could do it for next to nothing. I came up against ALL the hurdles Ted has mentioned. I paid the $500 and have a fantastic bumper and no headaches. I am impressed with your site and knowledge Ted...keep up the good work mate....Peter

Thank you the kind words, Peter!

A quick aside -- some people just love working on their boats; they are happy as clams with a beer can in one hand and a scraper in the other, day after day. I ask on boating forums where I can get something done, and these folks will not tell me, instead they bend my ear about how I can do it myself. They don't comprehend that some of us scrape our boat only out of necessity, that we hate this stuff, and our only interest is in getting it repaired.

Maybe part of the "friction" here is that someone will say they're trying to electroplate something and I may read into it that they just want the darn thing plated and aren't familiar with the fact that plating jobshops are readily available to do it for them. Meanwhile enthusiasts who enjoy hobby plating believe that the person would love to electroplate it themselves and we are stomping on their joy :-)

I especially appreciate your posting because it implies that you didn't particularly like the idea of electroplating yourself -- you did it to try to save money.

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

A. Hi, Maynard. I think you'll find our previously mentioned Introduction to Chrome Plating will give you a quick but good feel for what the chrome plating business is about.

I would strongly urge people to try their best to work a summer in a plating shop before volunteering to become eternally responsible for the toxic chrome chemicals they will need to buy.

If that isn't possible, at least join the National Association of Surface Finishers (nasf.org) and attend some local monthly meetings and the annual Sur/Fin convention, take a 2 to 4-day introduction to plating through NASF or Kushner Electroplating School, read a few of the most important books, and subscribe to the monthly journals to understand what's going on. Good luck!

Regards,