How to Set up a Simple Home Electroplating System

Hi Jon

I too have many reservations about home plating but there are two important points that have not been mentioned.

What is the base metal? Acid copper plating on steel is near impossible to get good adhesion -- which is why professionals use cyanides (or pyrophosphate which is difficult to control)

Also, the plating stage comes at the end of an appropriate (and essential) cleaning process which again depends on the base metal and will require tanks, rinsing, heating, waste disposal, etc.

Remember that it is easy to get elementary advice on the internet but when things do not go to plan (and they won't) you are left with the mess.

Surely there is a local plater who can help.

A. Hi Jon

If we underestimated your qualifications for this type of work, I would point you to the title of this thread "Plating at home".

We get a large number of questions asking for help with processes which are clearly beyond the understanding of the questioner.

You do indeed seem to have the basic knowledge in place, and to go further is probably beyond what is practical on an internet forum.

I would suggest that you contact the Institute of Materials Finishing - there is a link on this site or go straight to http://www.materialsfinishing.org/

They run distance learning courses on all aspects of plating and issue regular updates on EU regulations etc.

Hello again Jon,
When responders on this site give advice (including myself), we don't assume the person asking the questions is an amateur. In your earlier letter you stated that you had experience in handling chemicals and in a later letter had worked in a wet lab with hazardous chemicals. It was also good to hear that you went through the proper channels regarding environmental requirements in Denmark. If you had stated this early on, our responses would have been different. If I may speak for other faithful responders on this site, we give advice based on decades of experience. I would like to think our goal is to help others and if applicable, warn them of the pitfalls in electroplating. Good luck with your venture, and I wish you success.

A. Hi Patrick. Yes, cyanide-free zinc or gold plating would be both safer and easier than chrome plating. But functional electroplating is not easy. As the first step please try the zinc and copper plating student experiments we describe in the previously mentioned FAQ "How Electroplating Works", so that you can see for yourself how the process works while also learning the limitations. Then you can move on from there if you wish. Good luck.

Regards,

A. The usual method is to strip, clean, copper plate, fill the pits with tin-lead solder, polish and buff smooth, then copper-nickel-chrome plate.

It's a time consuming process, since deep pits will have to be manually cleaned of corrosion to sound metal, possibly with a drill bit or Dremel [on eBay or Amazon]. An expert might spend a few minutes per pit, and your part has hundreds.

$500 sounds like a lot of money, but given the man-hrs required may well be a fair price.

A. Hi Michael. A point that I've tried to make many times, with limited success, is that plating is drop-dead easy in concept (third graders can learn to electroplate things themselves within 5 minutes). And in a few very limited cases, useful plating isn't especially difficult either: jewelers easily plate gold jewelry, and people easily strip the chrome from auto emblems and gold plate them ...

But useful, robust, bright, pore-free, corrosion-resistant, strongly adhering, good-enough-to-sell plating on other than jewelry and previously plated auto emblems can be very difficult. Further, a plater must be concerned not just with successfully plating one item, but in not ruining his solutions by contamination or by letting them get out of whack; plating "in equilibrium" is very important and quite hard to do. Finally, commercial plating almost always involves organic wetters, brighteners, levelers, etc.

Moving on to your specific question, those organic addition agents are usually very temperature sensitive. So, usually, it's not so much a question of the acceptable temperature range for the copper sulphate, copper fluoborate, copper pyrophosphate, or copper cyanide per se, but the acceptable temperature range for those addition agents.

Regards,

A. Hi Ray. The quality of anything you can do will probably be significantly lower than the original plating, so you're more likely to get 50 days or 50 weeks from it rather than 50 years. But what I would probably do is try the simple electricity-free systems that have an activating disk and are heated in a microwave oven, and then apply a simple clearcoat like Everbrite [a finishing.com supporting advertiser].

Regards,

A. Hi Ray. The issue of electroless plating is difficult, with whole books written about it. It's tricky even semantically, with there being true electroless (autocatalytic) plating, immersion (replacement) plating, and "contact" plating with activating disks which seems to be a combination of autocatalytic and immersion. The short answer would be to follow the link to the Medallion Gold system we linked to on Amazon and read about it and see whether you like the idea. Best of luck.

Regards,

A. Hi Kelvin. If you just want to get some plated metal onto some plastic parts, without precision or real adhesion strength, you can just 'paint' the plastic with something conductive first, like copper-rich paint. Some other methods are listed on our FAQ, "How to Plate Organic Material".

But there are several pretty fat books covering plating on plastic, and they're directed at people who already are skilled at plating on metal, so they skip almost all of that. The techniques involve many steps. In short, there is no way you are going to properly plate plastic automobile grills at home.

No abstract questions please because answering them is impossible :-)

Regards,

A. Hi Tony. Please email some pics to mooney@finishing.com for posting here. Meanwhile, my guess is that it's what we call 'burning'. You can't zinc plate at 12 volts or anything close in a hobby size tank. 3 Volts is probably more like it. Good luck.

Regards,

A. Hi John! The issue here is that an internet public forum is the ultimate "one-room brick schoolhouse" -- visited by 3rd graders & post-docturals and everything in between; visited by people with years of plating experience & by those who have never even mixed pancake batter, and everyone in between. Although you're tired of warnings, 3rd graders and their parents certainly aren't.

If people pose an abstract question like "how do I do plating at home", it's difficult. If we say "Regarding the anodes...", we'll be accused of spouting mumbo-jumbo to baffle them with bullshit.

But if people tell us that they realize they must practice on scrap rather than thinking they can successfully plate their precious items right out of the gate, and if they tell us their general experience level, and if they tell us exactly what it is that they want to plate and why, we can almost always help.

Beyond that, we try to write articles on aspects of plating like Faraday's Law (the very first thing to understand if you want to do plating), How Plating Works, Introduction to Chrome Plating (explaining the several steps), Intro to Anodizing, Plating Shops for the New Millennium, and many other articles, and we refer people to books which offer knowledge in a more organized fashion than a one-room schoolhouse can.

So, readers, please pose a detailed question and we will be happy to try to answer it :-)

Regards,

A. Hi John. I think you'd enjoy trying it so I think you should. You're talking the exterior, right? You can try to nickel plate it. It probably isn't practical to follow that with chrome plating, but you can either gold plate on top of the nickel or just work hard at keeping it waxed.

Small adjustable power supplies are so cheap today that I wouldn't fool with a battery or battery charger. Although 10 A is not enough to bright nickel plate a fuel tank, it's enough to get something even that big nickel plated eventually. But practice with smaller pieces of scrap.

Start by sandblasting if you have the outfit, or scrubbing with a tampico brush, pumice powder, and a little detergent and water if not.

Regards,

A. Hi John
I am all in favour of people trying their hand a some types of plating. But your motorbike tank poses a couple of problems for you to consider.
The tank on even a small motorbike is quite a large item and therefore requires a big tank with significant amount of chemicals that have to be found and eventually disposed of.
In addition, they float if full of air. You could allow the plating solution to flow in or fill it with water first. Neither is easy to handle and dropping it ...
I see you are looking at nickel plating and that brings more to consider. Brush plating may sound attractive but nickel passivates very rapidly. That means that while plating part of the tank other areas are passivating and any further plating (to build up the thickness) will not bond to the first layer and eventually blister or peel off.
Personally I would look for alternative quotes or settle for a good paint job.

A. Hello John,
I agree with Geoff - a motor cycle petrol tank is pretty big and will require careful handling and preparation, as well as a large electroplating tank if you choose to go down that route. Geoff also mentions brush plating, which is a good option, if you have the kit available. You need to prepare the tank properly and maybe with a copper layer, otherwise any plating will peel off. Personally, I would not use nickel as the final finish, as it will turn green on prolonged exposure to the weather. You can prevent this by plating the nickel with chromium, although the conventional hexavalent chromium systems are now severely frowned on as the Cr(VI) is a major health hazard. It is worth mentioning that once the chromium metal has been deposited, it is not hazardous as it is no longer Cr(VI)! Another option is to use a nickel-tin coating - this has great properties, such as being highly reflective and corrosion resistant, although its use seems to have dwindled in recent years. This site offers a tutorial on Ni-Sn plating and it is well worth listening to.

Thanks, I will try smaller items to start with, like levers.